A LaGrange County jury

The courts opened before the county had much to try.

The first term sat in 1832 and had two cases, both continued. By the third year the record ran to some twenty pages, mostly assault and battery, riot, and violations of the liquor licence law. One of the state cases was against a woman for retailing liquor contrary to law. She was found guilty and fined two dollars.

Eighty state cases came onto the docket in the first three years. Writing fifty years later, the county's historian notes that this is almost the same number as the state cases of the present time.

Eighty in three years while the county was being cleared, and no more than that in 1882 with fifteen thousand people in it.

The first murder trial did not come until 1861.

In December of that year a party of young men from Clay Township assaulted Jacob Bean and some of his family. In the fight Bean was struck down and his neck broken. Three men were indicted and one, Hiram Springer, was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to two years.

He never served them. The Supreme Court found a technical fault in the records and relieved him of the sentence, and because this was war time the proceedings were dropped. The county history says he endeavoured to repair his record by gallant service at the front.

The Clay Township chapter of the same book names the others, which the courts chapter does not: Daniel Rowan, Whiting Phillips and several other young men. It says Springer was ultimately discharged.

Nine years later, at Ontario, Stephen Jenks shot a merchant named George Mallow.

Why is the one thing the record refuses. The cause is not clearly known. That is Rerick, who wrote both chapters and who declines to state what he cannot establish all through the volume.

The trial began in September of 1870 and finished at a special term in December. It ran fourteen days. The court room was densely crowded. James McGrew prosecuted with Andrew Ellison, and two Fort Wayne men defended.

They pleaded insanity, and it was the first time anyone in this county had.

The county took that badly, and the history explains why in terms that have nothing to do with Jenks.

Months earlier the country had followed the acquittal of McFarland, who killed Albert Richardson of the Tribune, and the county history says the plea here was felt to be an attempt to reproduce sharp New York criminal practice into a country where justice was yet dear.

Then Rerick does something he does nowhere else in the chapter. Rather than say what the county thought, he prints half a column of the LaGrange Standard and lets it say so.

It is high time that cracked-brained theorists on the laws of insanity, who seek to make their doctrines applicable to a defense in a case of murder, had a practical illustration of the dangerous nature of their teachings. The world is well stocked with moralizing fools that the community could get along without.

He introduces it as the sentiment of the people, well expressed. He does not say whether he shares it.

The jury struggled with the case for several hours and came back guilty, with the penalty fixed at life.

And then the sentence that is the whole of this piece.

A severer penalty was not expected, as the impression prevailed that a La Grange County jury would not sentence to death.

That is the county's own historian, writing in 1882, recording as settled local knowledge that this county's juries would not hang a man.

Public opinion generally acquiesced, he adds, though a considerable number gave credence to the defence of insanity after all.

It was not over.

The Supreme Court reversed the judgment, because the trial court had refused to continue the case so the defence could bring further evidence. Before the retrial, Jenks escaped from the jail.

He was not found again until 1877, when somebody discovered him working quietly in a Michigan village near Saginaw. He was retried on a change of venue in Elkhart County, given the same sentence, and taken to the penitentiary at Michigan City, where, the 1882 volume says, he still remains.

The third trial came the following summer and it is the one the county remembered.

On the twenty-second of June, 1871, Addie Dwight took her pupils down to the beach at Stone Lake at noon. She was eighteen and she taught the school. Chauncey Barnes came to the lake with a young woman from White Pigeon, and shot her twice, and when the neighbours reached him he was reloading the revolver on himself. What the county's histories record about her, and about him is its own piece.

A special term in December was given over to the case and it took four days. The defence was insanity again, and the verdict was the same as Jenks's: guilty, life. This time nobody appealed. The county history says the defence was content with saving the life of the young man.

Two insanity defences in two years, in a county that had just called the doctrine cracked-brained, and both of them worked exactly as far as the gallows and no further.

They had somewhere to put these men, more or less.

The first jail was built of logs, with iron-barred doors and windows and a high board fence round the cell windows for security. The county history calls it a picturesque, though not a very secure, abode for the misdoers of the county, and says that towards the end prisoners of any importance were taken to other counties and the building had become unhealthy.

It served thirty years. The replacement went up in 1873 for about twenty-nine thousand dollars, cased inside with iron and so constructed as to make escape for prisoners about impossible.

The same volume, in a different chapter, records an escape from it. A man named Miles, held for bigamy, got out just previous to this writing. He was recaptured and sent to the penitentiary for three years.

And once, briefly, the courts had more business than they could hold.

In January of 1858 the county's vigilance companies made a round of arrests. The old jail was crowded to its utmost with prisoners and the courts were overrun with business. At one term, seven men were sentenced to the penitentiary.

Several others were released by the Supreme Court, and not because anybody doubted the case. They had been tried in the Common Pleas Court and their crime was triable in the Circuit Court only.

The county history names none of the seven and never returns to them.

Six weeks before that term, in the next county, a committee appointed by one of those companies had hanged a man from a tree. The courts here sent seven men to Michigan City and let some go on a question of jurisdiction. The record does not connect the two, and this piece will not either.

The word does not appear.

Across the whole of the 1882 volume's account of this county, in every chapter, nobody is hanged. The word occurs twice in that book and both are in its Noble County half, describing the execution near Diamond Lake.

Whatever this county did with the men it convicted, it did not kill them. Its own historian says the impression prevailed that its juries would not, and then goes on to the public buildings.