The Birmingham age-herald., 1908-01-20
Public Will Be Excluded But
 Not Newspaper Men
BOWLING WILL BECIDE II.
Absolute Secrecy Is Out of the Cues ton in This Trial, But Counsel for Thaw Are Agreeable
 to Partial Privacy.

New York, January 19-When the Thaw
 trial is resumed tomorrow morning Jus
 tice Bowling will be called upon to de-
 termine whether or not the testimony
 of Evelyn Nesbt Thaw shall be taken
 behind closed doors. It is freely pre-
 dicted that he will refuse to exclude
 both the public and newspaper repre-
 sentatives, but a compromise may be
 reached by the exclusion of those who
 come only from idle or morbid curiosity.
 By leaving the newspaper men in the
 court room the constitutional provision
 as to public trial would be met and
 the young woman on the stand would
 have to face only a handful of people as
 compared with the vast crowd which
 thronged the court last Friday afternoon.
 As to keeping the story out of print Jus
 tice Bowling told District Attorney Je-
 rome when he sprang his surprising sug-
 gestion that if any newspaper cared to repeat the details of the recital it could
 do so simply by reference to it's files of year ago.
 Justice Bowling stated on Friday that he would hear further suggestion from counsel tomorrow morning, provided, of
 course, there should be general con sent to the closing of the doors-a thing
 never before done in this Jurisdiction in a murder trial. Martin W. Littleton,
 Thaw's chief counsel, who partly con-
 cured in the district attorneys motion
 when 1t was first made. has oecided to withdraw that concurrence and leave the
 matter entirely in the discretion of the court. Under these circumstances, it is
 declared, Justice Bowling will not at- tempt to keep the proceedings secret, but he may cooperate with the attor- neys in an endeavor to keep the gen. ] eral public out of the court room dur l ing the young woman's examination on | the witness stand. The non-eoncurrence
 of the defense in the plan for a closed hearing is said to be due to the atti- l tude of Thaw himself, who believes that he sees in District Attorney Jefome's l move D motive other than the public ! morals, on which he based it in his ad- 1 dress to Justice Bowling.
 Thaw believes that behind closed doors
 the prosecutor would go even further i in his cross-examination of his wife than l he did at the first trial, when with pitt l less persistence he drew from her many 1 of the details of the story which were l omitted in the direct evidence-details l which did not reach the public through ! any newspapers. Mir Jerome based his l eross-eXamination last year on the ground 1 of testing the credibility of the witness | and under the rulings of Justice Fitz-
 gerald this threw the doors wide open.
 Justice Bowling is inclined however, to
 cut down both direct and cross-examina- 1 tons to the material facts and it is
 generally believed that neither MT. Little 1 ton nor MT. Jerome will put the de- l fendants wife through the same severe l ordeal as last year.
 When young Mrs. Thaw has concluded her testimony anC has been put through the fire of cross-examination the elder Mrs. Thaw probably will conclude her l evidence. This will leave but three or l four regular witnesses to be heard before 1 the six insanity experts retained by the defense are to be put on the stand to answer a hypothetical question covering all of the testimony. Two of these phy- sicians. Drs Evans and Wagner, will tell again of the examination they made of Thaw in the Tombs prison, following the tragedy. The trial will be pushed
 with all possible haste to an early con clusion.