The reason Lincoln didn’t try more criminal cases is easy to
determine. Most crimes are committed by those who are unable to afford a
lawyer, that’s why we have a public defender system today. Lincoln practiced
law to make a living, and he seldom took non-paying cases.
Based on my research, I think Lincoln was a very good
criminal defense attorney, and he showed his talent early in his career. He had
not been practicing law for a year when he became associated in a murder case
against a politician by the name of Henry B. Truett. He was not lead counsel in
the case (you wouldn’t expect a rookie to be lead counsel in a murder case),
but he played a pivotal role in the defense of the case. Here’s how it
happened.
If you think politics is rough in this day and age, you
should have seen antebellum Illinois. Truett had just been appointed to public
office and some of his enemies got together a petition to have him removed.
Truett thought he knew who wrote the petition, and he wasn’t going to stand for
it. When he found the offender sitting in the lobby of a hotel reading a
newspaper, he left the lobby and got a handgun. He returned to the lobby,
cursed the offender, and pulled his handgun. The victim picked up a chair to
use as a shield and Truett shot him in the gut. The victim languished for
several days before giving a dying declaration and then expiring. The only
question in the public mind was “When is the hanging going to be?”
Lincoln’s senior partner and mentor, Stephen T. Logan, was
lead counsel and did most of the heavy lifting, but when it came time to give
the final argument, Logan asked Lincoln to deliver it. There are a lot of
lawyers who swear by final argument as the most important part of the trial,
and here was Logan turning that important phase of the trial over to a young
lawyer who had never tried a murder case. I don’t agree that the final argument
is most important part of the case, but as things stood in the Truett case, it
was supremely important.
Logan would later say that Lincoln gave an excellent final
argument. If you are inclined to look at the results before you judge the
quality of a performance, you will have to give Lincoln an A+. The jury
acquitted. The citizenry was mystified as to how a jury could possibly acquit. Truett
lost his appointment, and ever after lived under a cloud of suspicion that he
got away with murder.
Oh, by the way, Lincoln's opponent in his first murder case happened to be a lawyer by the name of Stephen A. Douglas.