After the prosecution rested in the trial of George Ives, the defense attorneys began their attempt to save his life.
Five attorneys defended Ives: James M Thurmond, John D. Ritchie, Alexander I Davis, H. P. A. Smith, and Colonel Wood. All of them were Secessionists who played to the Southern sensibilities in the crowd against Wilbur Sanders’s radical abolitionist views. Sanders, a former high-ranking Union officer, also wore his Union Blue officer’s caped greatcoat, which would not have helped his case against the Secessionist attorneys, or in the opinions of the significant numbers of Southern sympathizers in the crowd.
The defense called George Brown and “Whiskey Bill” Graves to give Ives an alibi, but as the exact time of the murder was uncertain, they could not have provided exact accounts of Ives’s whereabouts and activities over the course of a day, several days, or a week.
Both modern historians, Justice Mark Dillon and Frederick Allen, cite Dimsdale’s point that with the alibis failing, the defense sought to put the onus on “Long John” Franck. Wilbur Sanders wrote that the attorneys accused Franck of the worst kind of treachery, being someone who would “peach on his pals,” i.e., act as a stool pigeon.
The defense case seems to have been based on Ives’s charm, good looks, and wit. Despite their hammering at Franck, he stood firm. The defense rested their case.
The lawyers presented their closing arguments for and against Georges Ives’s guilt. Onlookers talked among themselves in the street, and in the restaurants and saloons. They spoke of other acts ascribed to Ives, and they heard more stories of Ives’s crimes than people felt able to say on the witness stand without fear of reprisal.
What we have to remember at this point is that the crowd gossiping and exchanging information among themselves was actually constituted as a jury under miners court rules. they were the”jury of the whole” that Wilbur Sanders was so eager to avoid, because their verdict would be based on hearsay and gossip. To us in the 21st century, it seems weird, if not shocking, but that’s how the miners of Alder Gulch — and all over the western mining regions — conducted trials. It was a pure form of trial by democracy, or the crowd.
At any rate, Ives’s lawyers did not have much of a defense to mount for their client. In the afternoon of December 21, the case went to the advisory jury — the twenty-four men from Junction and Nevada mining districts.
Next: The Juries Rule.
