by Kip Gayden
Christian could hear the babble of conversations going on all around him: “I’ll bet you a dollar to a doughnut hole they find her guilty . . .”
“Why, that woman’s as crazy as a loon! They’ll let her off—I’d be surprised if she don’t do it again, some day . . .”
“Well, that husband of hers sure ought to get some of the blame . . .”
“Did you see that little boy? So precious . . . such a shame . . .”
As the noon hour passed, the heat started to wither the air of expectancy. People were complaining, wondering out loud when the jury was ever going to finish this business. Christian even heard a few speculate about a hung jury. Wouldn’t that be something, he thought. Among other things, it would be a testimonial to old attorney Anderson’s skill in his closing oratory. To Christian, a hung jury looked like an answered prayer for Anna Dotson.
He decided to take advantage of his reserved seat; with the note from the court tacked to his chair, he wasn’t worried about finding a place to sit if the jury suddenly returned. Christian started moving around the courtroom, interviewing spectators to get the reaction of the general public. It would make some good copy. Many women in the courtroom, he soon found out, were mightily upset over the total dominance of the proceedings by men. “It’s a man’s world!” one of them said. “What chance has a woman got?” Christian noted her response, and he couldn’t help glancing up in the balcony at the suffrage women, sitting there like a Greek chorus in their white dresses and yellow sashes, watching from above. If he’d had the guts to go up there and talk to them, he calculated they’d tell him that the fault of the men involved in this case would be whitewashed, swept under the carpet, and otherwise ignored by the jury. An annoying little voice at the back of Christian’s mind told him they’d be right. He constructed a quote from one of them for his imaginary interview: “What justice can be done for women in a country where none but men are permitted to decide their guilt or innocence?”
Christian continued to speculate on what the jury was thinking. He decided that the most intriguing part of the murder trial involved the differences in perception between men and women over the misguided quest for independence by this solitary woman, Anna Dotson. Curiously, women seemed to rally around the beleaguered defendant; men mostly scorned her. Once again, he thought about the implications of having none but males on the voting rolls—and in the jury box. He looked at the twelve empty seats, eventually to be occupied by the men who were now deliberating Anna Dotson’s fate. After taking this long, their decision would be seen as controversial—no matter the outcome.
Sometime toward mid-afternoon, as his notepad was getting soggy with the perspiration from his hands, and the people in the courtroom were getting louder and louder, the bailiff was roused from his chair by the door of the jury room. He went down the hall to Judge Neil’s chambers and knocked on the door. Judge Neil listened, nodded, and sent him to the courtroom. The bailiff came in through the door behind the judge’s bench, unnoticed by anyone in the noisy courtroom except Christian. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Please be seated. The jury is ready to return a verdict! Folks! Settle down! The jury is ready. Please be seated, and please do not demonstrate after the verdict is announced!”
There was a hushed scurrying as people reclaimed their seats or stood against the walls. Christian took his seat in the front row. The courtroom became unnaturally quiet.
The prosecuting attorneys soon came back into the courtroom, led by the attorney general. Anna Dotson came next, white-faced and clutching her husband’s gold vest watch, which he’d given her as a good luck piece. She was followed by Walter and the children, followed by the team of somber defense lawyers, led by J. M. Anderson. Finally, the family and relatives of the deceased followed, though maintaining a careful distance from Anna and her party.
The bailiff announced, “Court is in session . . . all rise!” Judge Neil entered from his private door, directly behind his bench. He stood behind his chair and nodded to the bailiff.
The bailiff went over to jury entrance, next to the jury box, and opened the door. The twelve men slowly entered the deathly quiet courtroom. To a man, the jurors looked exhausted, completely used up. Large half-circles of perspiration stained their shirts beneath their arms; their sleeves were rolled up. Whatever they were about to announce, it hadn’t come easy.
“Please be seated.” Judge Neil said.
The benches creaked, and there was the soft scuffling of leather-soled shoes on hardwood, and then, again, complete silence.
“Has the jury reached a verdict?” Judge Neil said.
The foreman, Mr. Smith, stood up and gave a tired nod. “Yes we have, Your Honor.”
“Will the defendant please rise?” the judge said.
Anna Dotson stood up, a bit unsteadily, looking intently into the eyes of the jurors, still clenching the gold watch. Most of the jurors’ faces were bowed, avoiding eye contact with her or with anyone else. Christian wasn’t sure if this was from sheer fatigue or their feelings about what was about to happen. Most likely, it was both.
“And what is the verdict?” the judge said.
The foreman took a long look around the room, then looked directly at Judge Neil. He took a deep breath. “Your Honor, we, the jury, find the defendant guilty of involuntary manslaughter, and sentence her to five days in the county workhouse.”
40
Bedlam broke loose in the courtroom. Judge Neil pounded his gavel and the bailiff and other officers shouted. Finally the place calmed down enough for the judge to make himself heard again. He polled each member of the jury, asking each man if he concurred with the sentence. When he had satisfied himself that the jury wasn’t going to budge, he shook his head in apparent disgust, then ordered the bailiff to take Anna into custody so that she could begin serving the terms of the sentence the jury had just pronounced. It was the first instance of jury nullification Christian could remember in all the trials he’d covered, and Judge Neil looked fit to be tied. Judges didn’t even like to have their cases overturned by the normal appeals process; to have a jury decide to ignore or modify the instructions the judge had given them was even more galling. It happened sometimes, but it was very rare.
When the foreman read the sentence, the other reporters jumped up and sprinted from the courthouse, each vying to be the first to communicate the unbelievable news to his newspaper. But Christian sat there, trying to gain control of his tumbling mind. He knew that the Tennessean, as well as the newspapers in Atlanta, Knoxville, Chattanooga, and elsewhere that were running his stories about the trial, wouldn’t publish anything unless it was under his byline. He hadn’t been sitting in the police station during Anna’s arrest for nothing, after all. So, there wasn’t that big a hurry. Christian wanted to talk to the jurors, the judge, or anybody else that could help him explain to the public how the most publicized murder case in recent years had come down to such a bizarre ending.
What gradually emerged from Christian’s conversations with the jurors was that J. M. Anderson’s voir dire tactics about the suffrage movement, combined with his closing arguments, had found their mark. Some of the jurors, at least, gave serious consideration to Anna’s motivation. They also began thinking about how things would have been different if it had been Walter Dotson as defendant, rather than his wife.
None of this held water with Judge Neil. When he was interviewed after the trial, he characterized the sentence as a “miscarriage of justice.” This phrase was even repeated in the next day’s banner headlines.
From the jurors’ views, though, things looked different. As Christian found out from his interviews, the first issue taken up as the deliberations began on Monday afternoon was the defense of monomania. After lengthy discussion, six jurors remained convinced that Anna was sane at the time of the shooting, while six thought she was insane. Neither side would budge.
Around eleven o’clock that Monday evening, the exasperated jurors tentatively vo
ted to report the impasse to the judge. However, the foreman, J. D. Smith, convinced the jurors to temporarily set aside the debate over the monomania defense and deliberate as if Anna Dotson were sane.
So, the jury turned to the charge of first-degree murder, and what the punishment should be if the defendant was sane. They meticulously went back over all the testimony, concentrating on Anna’s own words. The jury agreed that the murder was premeditated, but even so, there was still another irreconcilable split amongst the jurors with regard to the punishment.
Three of the jurors felt strongly that the prosecution had made a case for the death penalty and reminded the other jurors, who didn’t feel so strongly about it, of the judge’s final charge. If they determined she was sane at the time of the murder and they found her guilty, they must sentence her to life in prison or to be hanged.
Periodically, the jurors told Christian, the discussion turned to the side issue of women not being able to sit in judgment of one of their own. The jurors knew firsthand from the suffragettes that women openly questioned how a “men only” group could possibly carry out justice in this case. Some of the jurors said they felt pressure from the looks of the suffragettes in the balcony.
Christian began to realize that J. M. Anderson’s tactics had amounted to a brilliant move. The defense attorney was able to plant the notion of women’s rights in the mind of each juror, and to ask them questions about it during voir dire. At the time, it seemed like a side issue. But as the trial wore on, Anderson’s strategy came more and more to the front—in the juror’s minds, at least. Christian reflected that this was the way history worked sometimes. What seemed irrelevant today might turn out tomorrow to be the deciding factor. By assuring the presence on the jury of at least six men who had an open mind toward women’s suffrage, Anderson guaranteed that the prospect of a woman’s fate being decided by an exclusively male jury would come under discussion. Sure enough, the six pro-suffrage jurors made their opinions known.
One juror commented, “You know, every time we left the Hermitage Hotel to come to court in the mornings, and when we went back to the hotel when the judge adjourned for the day, them suffragettes would always be there near the front door, dressed in them white dresses with them yellow sashes. And the way they looked at us . . . they wanted our attention.”
Another juror said, “How could we miss the message on that sign one of the suffragettes held up outside the front door of the hotel every day: ‘No right to vote, no right to sit on juries, no right to judge our own.’ I think they wanted to let us know we ought to consider the fact that a woman was not allowed on the jury to judge Anna Dotson.”
Yet another juror pointed out to Christian, “The headquarters of the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association is in the Hermitage Hotel . . . That’s why we seen them all the time . . . What do you expect?” Indeed, Christian found out later that several of the suffragettes who had attended the trial had also participated in the Washington, D.C., protests.
After another polling of the jury by the foreman during the wee hours of Tuesday morning, three of the jurors still remained in favor of the death sentence. Five others favored a life sentence. Four of the men recommended a lighter sentence, a conviction on second-degree murder with a twenty-year prison sentence.
The jury appeared to be once again hopelessly deadlocked, this time on the issue of the punishment. Again they voted to announce a hung jury to the court. But J. D. Smith once more convinced the jurors to continue deliberations. Since none of the jurors really wanted to announce an impasse, they reluctantly agreed to strive for a verdict they could all live with.
By late morning, even the foreman was about to throw in the towel. Then one juror, a Mr. Peebles, came up with an idea: “Why don’t we deliberate as if Walter Dotson had shot Charlie Cobb?” The jurors agreed to look at it that way.
The jurors went around the table, each stating his own views about the case had Walter Dotson been on trial for the murder of Charlie Cobb. The first thing they agreed upon was that if given the chance, Dr. Walter Dotson would have certainly shot Charlie Cobb, and he would have been on trial for murder, not Anna Dotson. This was when, Christian suspected, J. M. Anderson’s final arguments were ringing most strongly in their ears.
Then, in a very interesting development, the jurors decided to discuss the general range of punishment as if Walter Dotson had killed Charlie Cobb. In the process of considering what they would have done with Walter Dotson, the jurors began to realize that they had been applying a double standard to Anna Dotson.
As a result of looking at the case in a different angle, the jurors began to reluctantly discard some of their views of women. The concept of equality began to control their deliberations. “If Anna Dotson were a man, on trial under the same circumstances, what would we do?” they asked. And their answer would begin to reshape the perception of equality between the sexes in Tennessee for years to come.
Epilogue
NASHVILLE TENNESSEAN
and The Nashville American
* * *
Vol. 7–No. 45. June 25, 1913
* * *
VERDICT OF JURY IN FAMOUS MURDER CASE DELIVERED TUESDAY AFTERNOON
“She shall serve every minute of it,” declared Judge A. B. Neil, of the criminal court, when the jury, after deliberating more than twenty-one hours over the fate of Mrs. Anna Dotson, charged with the murder of Charlie Cobb, brought in a verdict of involuntary manslaughter Tuesday afternoon at 2 o’clock, with a sentence of five days in the Davidson County jail. From the evidence produced, Judge Neil expressed himself as being thoroughly dissatisfied with the finding of the jury, declaring that it was a miscarriage of justice.
When the twelve men, worn and tired with their long fight that waged all through the night, walked into the courtroom, a dead hush overspread the crowd that packed the room. Mrs. Dotson was sitting with her husband and attorneys, and when the door opened she became deathly pale.
When the stentorian tones of the foreman announced the verdict, she stared straight ahead of her as though she did not understand and suddenly laughed quietly to herself, while the attorneys jubilantly congratulated Dr. Dotson and his wife.
The court was thunderstruck at the verdict. Never before, declared the judge and attorney-general, had they heard of such an opinion in the case of murder like this one.
After a consultation the attorneys for defense announced that the defendant would serve the sentence, and she was taken in charge by Jailer Will Longhurst and taken to the woman’s department and locked up. Dr. Dotson accompanied his wife to the jail office, where tender farewells took place between the prisoner, her young son, daughter, and brother. The scene was affecting.
When the jury reported the verdict there was no demonstration. According to several attorneys the criminal court had set a precedent in the settlement of murder cases.
Mrs. Cobb, the widow of the dead barber, sat quietly by the side of her father-in-law, when the jury returned and when the verdict was announced, leaned her head on her hands in dejection. She declared that she did not wish any one harm, but further than that would say nothing in regard to the case. “Of course I am disappointed, but I don’t care to say anything else.”
Attorney-General Anderson, when seen shortly after the announcement, declared that the jury had grossly failed in its duty. He said that Judge Neil specifically charged them that if they found the woman was not insane, a verdict of murder in the first degree should be returned. He declared that by sentencing her they found that she was not insane and had, therefore, failed to carry out the instructions of the judge and had also failed in their duty to the state at large.
Monday morning a large crowd assembled at the courtroom, thinking that the jury would report at 9 o’clock. It was learned that an agreement had not been reached, and court was adjourned at 10 o’clock until 2 o’clock. The halls were crowded during that interval and the telephone in the office kept the clerks busy. When court convened the crowd was e
ven larger, standing several deep against the walls and blocking the windows and doors.
Immediately after the verdict was announced Judge Neil dismissed the jury. In speaking of the case afterward, Judge Neil declared that he was thoroughly disappointed with the verdict. “Are you going to let her serve the sentence?” he was asked. “That I am. Every minute of it,” he declared emphatically. “Of course, I have no criticism to make of the case, but I am disappointed.”
An incident that was only brought to light Tuesday morning was the fact that Monday, during the closing of the argument a group of local suffragettes were present in court, lined up near the defendant, when Judge J. M. Anderson made his eloquent appeal for the prisoner, and wept during the whole time that he spoke.
Later in the evening Mrs. Dotson was taken by automobile to the county workhouse, where she was housed at the home of Frank Graham, assistant superintendent. Mr. Graham stated Tuesday night that she would be made to work like the rest of the women who are sent to serve sentences at the place. She is the only white woman now under sentence at the workhouse.
It was later stated at the criminal court that the jury was tied on Monday night, nine standing for acquittal and three for murder in the second degree, with a twenty-year sentence. It was rumored that a large number of the jurors were Masons, as was Dr. Dotson.
Judge J. M. Anderson, who led the defense, when asked for a statement in regard to the verdict, declared that he had nothing to say.
After the trial, Walter Dotson resigned from many of his extra activities in order to spend more time with his wife and family. The following year, Walter and Anna moved to Lebanon, Tennessee, where he resumed his medical practice.
World War I came and Dr. Dotson volunteered for the Army Medical Corps; he ended his stint in the United States Army with the rank of major and was bestowed with several military awards and citations. After returning home from the war, Walter Dotson signed a petition that called upon the Tennessee legislature to vote for ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the amendment that would grant women the right to vote—and to sit on juries.