Tom Mooney Trial: 1917

In his defense, Tom Mooney said he and Rena Mooney had watched the parade from atop the Eilers Music Company Building at 975 Market Street, 1.15 miles from the site of the bombing. To prove this, Cockran introduced three photographs taken from the roof by an Eilers employee. Enlargements made in the presence of two detectives revealed the time on a street clock down on Market: eight minutes, five minutes, and two minutes before the bomb went off. In each photo, Tom and Rena Mooney could be seen in the foreground, on the rooftop. In addition, 12 witnesses swore that Tom Mooney had been there throughout the parade.

The defense tried to show that Mooney was being framed. Weinberg testified that private detective Swanson had earlier tried to bribe him. Cockran asked for a directed acquittal, but Judge Franklin A. Griffin ruled that was up to the jury.

The district attorney himself, Charles Fickert, summarized for the prosecution and asked for the death penalty. His stirring words urged the jury to be fearless:

For, with conscience satisfied with the discharge of duty, no consequence can harm you. There is no evil that we cannot face or fly from but the consciousness of duty disregarded. A sense of duty pursues us ever. It is omnipresent like the deity …

The D.A. went on for another minute or two in this vein, an inspiration to juryman and spectator alike. But on the front page of the Bulletin that evening, two reporters revealed that the same inspiration had been uttered, word for word, by Daniel Webster at a murder trial in 1830.

Defense attorney Maxwell McNutt's summation to the jury charged that Martin Swanson had devised a frame-up—an idea that prosecutor Cunha labeled absurd. Judge Griffin advised jury members they were entitled to question the trustworthiness of the prosecution if they viewed the arrest of the defendants without warrants as a violation of their rights, and he invited them to weigh the credibility of the witnesses as well.

In 6 and one-half hours, the jury found Tom Mooney guilty of first-degree murder and recommended the death penalty.