Court Opinion

ID: 9756226
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 21:16:04.611805+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:28:16.604446
License: Public Domain

Concurring Opinion by
Mr. Justice Musmanno :
I heartily concur in the excellent and illuminating Opinion by Chief Justice Jones and have only one observation to make.
The murder, of which the defendant Aaron Turner was convicted, and which, it is now rather clearly shown, cannot, under accepted standards of proof, be attributed to him, occurred December 15, 1945. The case has thus been in the courts for over 11 years. Turner has had five trials and he was four times convicted and sentenced to death. The fifth trial resulted in a conviction but with sentence fixed at life imprisonment. If he will be acquitted at the next trial or, what appears more probable, he will be discharged because of a nolle prosequi resulting from lack of evidence, it *272will be proved that the long fight for his vindication was a worthwhile and justifiable one.
From time to time one reads and hears criticism of American courts because of the lapsed time between the happening of a crime and the final disposition of the criminal charge which follows. The critics invariably point with alarm to our courts and with pride to the English courts, averring that in England a man may be charged with murder and actually hanged on the gallows before we here in America have finished selecting the jury which is to try him. It has always seemed to me that this is a carping criticism.
Without yielding to anyone in my admiration of undoubted excellences in the British system of justice, I still cannot find fault with our determined effort in America to get the right man, and only the right man, before hanging him. I don’t doubt that in the long tortuous length of the Turner case, many critics have complained that the attorneys representing him have been “taking advantage” of our courts. Yet, if these attorneys had not possessed the perseverance, and our courts had not been willing to listen, and the pragmatic wisdom of American democracy had not provided the machinery and the opportunity for the continued effort which would result in the ascertainment of the exact truth, an innocent man might probably have gone to an undeserved death.
And now that a eleven-year continuous endeavor for justice has apparently reached the only conclusion it should have reached, I cannot help but express a renewed and continuing admiration for lawyers who, despite rebuffs and seeming failure, carry on, in the tribunals set up by the genius and the fairness of the American people, in the search for the priceless jewel of truth.