In 1913, Percy Bowden was the deputy to Cochise County Sheriff Harry Wheeler. One of their tasks was to serve summons for jury duty. They had a hard time finding people, because people seemed to "make themselves scarce" when juror selection time came around. Percy and the sheriff drove all over the county, several times, looking for folks.
"After this chore was over, Harry Wheeler told Percy that he believed that there must be a better way to round up jurors for duty than this method... The next year at about the same time, he told Percy that they would attend a rodeo and see if they could find some men to serve on the jury for the coming fall term of court and save a lot of time they both needed for other places. They arrived and mingled with the crowd for a while, then went back to the car where he started writing in names on the summonses. They took them and very quickly served twelve picked men, half the number they needed. Later, they went to a well-attended dance and got the other twelve served in the same fashion; one of the sponsors said it might hurt attendance at their next dance. Knowing this was not the legal method of handling this, the little sheriff told Percy they would think up some other way to do it the next year." (Bond p18)
And indeed, the next year, Sheriff Wheeler sponsored his own dance. He and Percy were the musicians; between the two of them, they could play one song, called "Turkey in the Straw." They played that song the entire evening - with only one early failed attempt at some other song - varying the speed and tone to make it work for various types of dances.
"At each intermission Harry would write a few names on the summonses. Close to one o'clock the ladies put a table in the center of the dance hall and piled it with good-looking sandwiches and drinks... Harry said that this was the time to serve the jury summonses. He handed Percy part of them, and they soon had their twenty-four jurors ready for the next term of court. Percy noticed that almost all the selected jurors were young baseball players that they had been playing against in different towns... Percy asked him why he wrote in so many ball players, and he said that after court each day they could get up a game with this crowd." (Bond p19-20)
The judge wasn't happy with Wheeler's method of jury selection, and he almost got in trouble. The following year, they did it the legal way.
[Excerpts from the book Percy Bowden, Born to be a Frontier Lawman, by Ervin Bond, p18-20]
No comments:
Post a Comment