of guilty. The wisdom, candor and integrity of the board of trial cannot be questioned. Neither are we disposed to impeach the witnesses in general. Even the prisoner himself had confessed the crime, and after all we are assured that they are innocent. It may prove a caution to us to look as favorable as possible on the side of innocency, and to the exercise of that charity that “hopeth all things,” and not be too hasty in taking up a reproach against our neighbor. Courts of judicature are hereby taught to proceed with the utmost deliberation and carefulness, especially in cases of life and death, and not decide without very clear and conclusive evidence.29


Leonard Deming Leonard Deming is one of the stalwarts of


early Vermont historiography. His 1851 Cat- alogue of the Principal Officers of Vermont is a classic, containing lists of all of the men who served in the four branches of state government until that time (including the Council of Censors), with sketches of some of the worthies, and wonderful stories about legislators, drawn in part from Deming’s at- tendance at legislative sessions as early as 1823. It was three years earlier, in 1820, that he lost a suit brought against him for the sale of 292 hen’s eggs, an experience that apparently dealt a severe blow to his sense of justice. To support his petition to the leg- islature for a new trial, he published A Col- lection of Useful, Interesting, and Remark- able Events, Original and Selected, from Ancient and Modern Authorities in 1825, containing 324 pages of illustrations of bad decisions of courts from English and Ameri- can sources, following 48 pages where he reprinted every deposition and writing on his egg claim. Among his conclusions was the idea that attorney’s fees should be paid exclusively by a state tax. This book leads in- exorably to the conclusion that Deming was an obsessively wronged defendant, but he was particular in his choices for illustrations, and the Boorn case was so ripe an illustra- tion of a court gone wrong.30


Deming devoted many pages to the Boorn murder trial, replicating the materi- als placed in the 1819 House Journal, which had been offered to support the commuta- tion of sentences of the brothers. He made no comment on the matter. As with his oth- er examples of wrongful convictions, he let the facts speak for themselves, without analysis. But no one would miss the point he was trying to make. Justice can go awry.


Lucius Manlius Sargent


John Spargo listed Lucius Manlius Sar- gent’s Dealings with the Dead (1856) among


www.vtbar.org


The judges, with tears in their eyes, sentencing Stephen and Jesse to be hanged, for the murder of Colvin—the best books on evidence, before them, and open at the pages where it is ex- pressly stated that extra-judicial con- fession, under fear of death, and hope of pardon, shall never be received— and the leaf turned down, at the au- thority of Sir Matthew Hale, that no conviction ought ever to take place, upon trials for murder and manslaugh- ter, till the fact be clearly provide, or the dead body be discovered.33


Sargent grew angrier as his columns con- tinued. He called Jesse’s confession “this clotted mass of inconsistent absurdity, ex- torted by hope and fear,” and condemned Judge Chase for allowing it to be received in evidence.34


He suggested that a “perfect


horror of induction seems to have settled down, like a dense cloud, upon the south- western corner of Vermont” and that “[j] udges and jurymen appear to have been stupefied, by its power.”35 Sargent represents the wave of criticism and contempt many felt for the Boorn trial, although his version is the most slanderous to the Court.


Leonard Sargeant’s Memories


Although there were many published ac- counts of the proceedings, and commentar- ies on its meaning, two treatments stand out as complementary, but opposing, views of the trial. One was written by defense coun- sel Leonard Sargeant, whose study of the Boorn murder case was published fifty-eight years after the trial, in 1873. The other was the pamphlet written by Vermont Supreme Court Chief Justice Sherman Moulton, pub- lished in 1937. Sargeant’s study came at the end of a long career, that included two years as Ver- mont’s


Lieutenant-Governor (1848-1850), THE VERMONT BAR JOURNAL • SUMMER 2012 11


his sources for his version of the story, call- ing it a “weird and blood-chilling book.”31 Sargent was a columnist for the Boston Eve- ning Transcript when he wrote a series of columns beginning in 1848 that are noted for their sharp and violent edges. Sargent seldom wrote quietly. He dedicated several columns to the Boorn case, and he did not hold back in criticizing the Court. In Sargent’s view, the confessions should never have been admitted, and the lack of a body should have been definitive in stop- ping the prosecution of the Boorns. “[U]pon the trial of the Boorns, the well-established rules of evidence had been outrageously vi- olated, and a great fundamental principle of criminal jurisprudence shamefully disregard- ed, by the court!”32


He imagined a painting that might be created of the scene:


Ruminations: The Trials of Jesse and Stephen Boorn


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