The Most Disastrous Criminal Trials In U.S. History

The ideal American criminal trial is speedy and drama-free, even if it involves sex, money, murder, or all three — not to mention religious, ethnic, and racial animus. But a look at U.S. legal history reveals that the country has had its fair share of legal disasters. When one thinks of a disastrous trial, one cannot help think of a reality TV-type judge show — litigants argue over sex or money, people cheer and occasionally get into fist fights. That is certainly one type of disaster — something America has since at least since the 1875 adultery trial of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. Then there are the much more serious disasters, ranging from wrongful convictions, like the Salem Witch Trials or the case of the Scottsboro Boys, to incompetent witnesses and prosecutors, as seen in the trial of John Gotti, among others. Here are some moments of America's legal system at its worst. 

In 1980, three Washington, D.C., men were tried for armed robbery of several Georgetown students returning from class, illegal handgun possession, and sexual assault by inappropriate touching of the female victim. The city had some damning evidence against the defendants. Police had arrested them almost immediately after the robbery and found the suspects in possession of the victims' belongings. Thus, the case appeared to be a run-of-the-mill criminal trial that would end in a conviction.

After two days of deliberation, the jury still had not reached a verdict. According to The Washington Post, the holdup was reportedly over juror Marian White's refusal to convict the defendants. Since under U.S. law, a jury must be unanimous to convict a defendant in a felony case, White's alleged refusal to convict threatened to send the jury into a third day of deliberation. Furthermore, according to the jury forewoman Anne Wiltse and several of her fellow jurors, White had missed the key evidence against the defendants because she had fallen asleep during the proceedings.

The frustrations boiled over when Wiltse and White got into a brawl in the jury room that included slapping and biting. A federal marshal and the court clerk had to separate them, ultimately placing White in a headlock. The judge declared a mistrial and sent the jury home. The defendants were convicted in a subsequent trial, which was upheld on appeal.

The trial of Darrell Brooks, who killed six and wounded dozens more – mostly grandmothers and children — with a car at a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, should have been straightforward. Everyone saw him do it and he was caught on camera. But when Brooks fired his public defender, withdrew his insanity plea, and opted to represent himself, observers knew the trial would be far from smooth.

During the trial, Brooks repeatedly picked fights and disrespected Judge Jennifer Dorow, even telling her she had no right to order him around because he was a grown man with grown children — she could only ask him to do something, and he would comply if he wished. He also — among other outbursts — bizarrely went off on one of the prosecutors over the way she said the word "defendant." On the legal side, Brooks claimed to be a "sovereign citizen," arguing the court could not try him because he did not consider himself a U.S. citizen and thus was not subject to American law. Finally, in his closing statement, he claimed that God had willed for the killings to happen, making his conscience clear.

Dorow, who received praise for her poise before Brooks' insolence, tolerated none of his behavior. She repeatedly castigated Brooks and ejected him from the courtroom, forcing him to attend the majority of the trial virtually from a side room. The jury convicted him of murder, for which he received six consecutive life sentences.

Seventeen-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse was tried for murder for killing two men and shooting a third during the Kenosha unrest on August 25, 2020. He was acquitted of all charges on self-defense grounds at a tense trial that saw prosecutorial misconduct and even MSNBC getting banned from the courtroom for following the jury bus.

The star of the show was prosecutor Thomas Binger, who gave America a lesson on how not to run a prosecution. The judge repeatedly castigated him, most notably for mentioning Rittenhouse's silence after the shooting — his 5th Amendment right — during the cross examination. The prosecution took a further blow when it turned out they had charged him with illegal gun possession despite knowing Rittenhouse was not in violation of Wisconsin law, which only applied to short-barreled rifles under 16 inches long. The judge promptly dropped the charge. Finally, Binger committed a gun safety violation by pointing a closed-bolt rifle at the audience with his finger on the trigger.

The biggest disaster, however, was star prosecution witness Gage Grosskreutz — the third man whom RIttenhouse shot, but survived. Grosskreutz allowed the defense to run roughshod over him, answering with his version of events, only to have the video tell a different story and forcing him to change his story while under oath. In the end, he was forced to admit to running at Rittenhouse with a gun in his hand, strengthening Rittenhouse's claim to self-defense and undermining the prosecution's allegations that Rittenhouse had committed murder.

The trial of Florida mom Casey Anthony, who was accused of killing her daughter Caylee, appeared to be a slam-dunk for prosecutors mostly because it seemed like no one else could have done it. During the trial, however, the defense was able to cast doubt on much of the evidence, which was quite strong, as not meeting the reasonable-doubt threshold needed to convict. From a purely legal perspective, the defense had a point. The hair found in Anthony's car could not be DNA-tested for a match to Caylee, while finds of suspected products of human decomposition in her car's trunk could theoretically have resulted from other processes.

The prosecution's mistake was not using bad evidence, but rather failing to introduce the computer evidence tying their exhibits together — something that shocked even the defense. According to a Local 6 Orlando exclusive, the Orange County Sheriff's Office somehow failed to provide internet search evidence that suggested Anthony had researched how to commit a murder without getting caught. The websites and timing of the searches pointed to her, not her father, and were consistent with the prosecution's timeline of the death.

Had this evidence come out during the trial, prosecutors interviewed by Local 6 said the evidence would have thrown serious doubt on the defense's claim that the death was accidental. Without this evidence, jurors said they had no choice but to acquit — despite being utterly disgusted with their verdict.

Thirty-two-year-old Lizzie Borden was America's original ax murderer, charged with hacking her father and stepmother to death in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892. The initial evidence pointed to her. Police noted she was not sorrowful about the deaths, her story continued to change, she had attempted to buy the poison prussic acid, and her friend testified she burned the dress she wore the day of the killings. The prosecution, however, failed to take advantage of the evidence because it could not muster up the conclusive proof from the crime scene. The hatchets allegedly used in the killings  had no blood on them. Borden's dress had one single drop, which the defense easily shot down. Borden's attempt to buy prussic acid was thrown out on the grounds the substance could be legitimately used — something the prosecution failed to counter. 

At best, the prosecution could hope for a mistrial, but had not counted on ethno-religious rivalries that slanted the jury toward the defense. The trial occurred at a time of tension between newly arrived Irish Catholics and founding-stock Protestants in Massachusetts. Majority-Catholic Fall River was excluded from the jury pool, meaning the jurors were mostly drawn from the heavily Protestant rural areas of Bristol County. Borden's defenders in the press claimed that a Catholic male immigrant must have killed the Bordens — a wealthy, respectable Protestant female Sunday school teacher would never do such a thing. The jury agreed and acquitted her in an hour.

The 1970 trial of California felon James McClain began as a run-of-the-mill appeal. His lawyer Thomas Bruyneel told the San Francisco Chronicle he expected his client to walk from an assault charge against an Oakland police officer. Instead, he died in a shootout after a gunman named Jonathan Jackson, armed with a full auto carbine, took the courtroom hostage. 

Jackson's motive was to get his brother George, who had been involved in the killing of a guard at the Soledad Correctional Facility, out of prison. To this end, he took presiding judge Harold Haley and three female jurors hostage, put a stick of dynamite on the judge's neck, gave McClain and two other felons guns, and attempted to escape in a van. He hoped that the state would negotiate for the hostages' freedom – a condition of which would be the release of his brother.

As the van started to move out of the parking lot, events became fuzzy. According to Marin County Inspector Ron Retani, cited in The New York Times, one of the felons aimed a weapon at officers, who returned fire at the van. In the confusion, Judge Haley, McClain, Jackson, and a third felon named William Christmas were killed. Juror Maria Graham was shot in the arm. Months later in October, domestic terror group the Weather Underground (aka the Weathermen) bombed the civic center in revenge for Jackson's death. In the wake of the shooting, California politicians called for tighter gun laws.

The Scottsboro Boys trial involved nine Black teenagers who were accused of raping two young white women on an Alabama train in 1931. In the initial trials, eight were convicted and sentenced to death, while a ninth faced life in prison due to his age, despite glaring inconsistencies and due process violations.

From the beginning, the defendants were denied counsel of their choice and forced to go on trial before all-white juries in a selection process that excluded local Black people. They were convicted primarily on the women's testimony, which alleged they forced several young white men off the train at gunpoint and raped the women. Doctors, however, said neither woman showed signs of sexual assault — only sexual intercourse, suggesting any sexual activity that day was consensual. Furthermore, one of the women, Victoria Price, was known to work as a prostitute. And according to one witness, Price, who lived in one of the poor, racially integrated parts of Scottsboro, was not racially discriminatory in her clientele. But given the emotions triggered by the alleged crime's nature, all-white juries unsurprisingly convicted the defendants every time.

The Supreme Court overturned the guilty verdicts on due process grounds, but the Scottsboro Boys were convicted in a retrial, leading to a campaign for their pardons. Charges were dropped against four of the defendants in 1937. By 1976, four more were dead, leaving only Clarence Norris to receive a pardon — ironically from one of Jim Crow's biggest champions, Alabama Gov. George Wallace.