This month in 1920, the start of a slightly strange criminal case in which the jury didn’t just weigh the evidence… they drank it.
This was in the era known as Prohibition; the US had made it illegal in most cases to produce, sell or possess alcoholic beverages.
It wasn’t airtight: people definitely took advantage of loopholes in the law, and some places enforced the ban more than others.
But even in those areas, there were bootleggers, speakeasies, rumrunners, all sorts of efforts to buy, sell, trade and drink liquor where it was not supposed to be.
That’s what brought a detective to the houses of William and Elmer Fisher, two brothers in Wilmington.
The detective arrested William Fisher after finding 30 cases of whiskey in his house; the next day, he raided Elmer’s place and found seven cases of whiskey and several cases of brandy.
William didn’t give an explanation for why there was so much whiskey in his house, but Elmer… tried to.
He claimed that he’d bought the liquor before Prohibition took effect, which made it legal, and also that he and his brother were moving the liquor to their dad’s house, AND that he kept it for their baby (!), like maybe to rub on a tooth that was coming in, and he said while he had not had a drink himself in 12 years, he wanted the booze in case he decided to resume drinking.
Prosecutors overlooked these airtight alibis and they tried Elmer Fisher under the liquor laws in the fall of 1920.
They brought the illicit liquor into the courtroom as evidence.
But remember, in our system, a person is innocent until proven guilty, and a jury decides whether prosecutors have made the case for conviction.
When this jury started deliberating, they took one of the bottles of whiskey with them.
Everybody else involved sat tight, waiting for a verdict; instead, the jury sent a note to the judge asking for a second bottle.
When they finally came out of the jury room, the newspapers noted that both bottles “bore evidence of having been thoroughly tested.”
The jurors apparently wanted to find out for themselves whether the bottles really had whiskey in them.
Or maybe they already knew it was whiskey and this was their chance to partake without running afoul of the law themselves.
Whatever it was, the jury returned a verdict: Elmer Fisher was not guilty, he was a free man again, though one who was two bottles shorter.
Contractor Tim King of Lombard, Illinois, was doing a small renovation project at his parents’ house when he found something behind a piece of dry wall: a Christmas gift with his name on it.
It was a set of Matchbox jets he was supposed to have gotten 46 years earlier, but obviously the dry wall had other plans.
Prohibition: The jury tasted the evidence and found defendant not guilty (Delmarva Now)
