On July 21, 1925, a jury in Dayton, Tennessee, took nine minutes to find teacher John T. Scopes guilty of violating a state law that banned the teaching of human evolution in public schools. The judge fined him $100. The case, known ever since as the Scopes "Monkey Trial," became, in the words of the ACLU's Daniel Mach, "internationally famous."
The law at issue was the Butler Act, which Tennessee Governor Austin Peay signed on March 21, 1925. The American Civil Liberties Union then offered to defend anyone charged under it, so the law's constitutionality could be tested in court, according to Wikipedia's account of the trial.
A trial built on purpose
Dayton took the offer. Scopes, a 24 year old high school teacher, became the defendant in a deliberate test case. Historian Edward Larson of Pepperdine University told NPR the town "decided they wanted to stage this test of the new state law," and called it "a concocted trial." Larson also said that "Scopes never really taught evolution," NPR reported on the trial's 100th anniversary. The famous play and film versions of the story get the test case part wrong, the network noted.
The lawyers turned a small town case into a national event. William Jennings Bryan, a three time presidential candidate and former secretary of state, joined the prosecution with district attorney Tom Stewart. Clarence Darrow led the defense, alongside Dudley Field Malone and ACLU lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays. Judge John T. Raulston presided.
The trial opened on July 10, 1925, in the Rhea County Courthouse. Chicago radio station WGN carried it, making it the first trial in the United States broadcast nationally on radio. H.L. Mencken covered it for The Baltimore Sun and gave it the name that stuck, "Monkey Trial."
Darrow puts Bryan on the stand
The most famous moment came on July 20, 1925, according to the Linda Hall Library. Bryan agreed to be questioned by Darrow as an expert on the Bible. Because of the heat, the court had moved outdoors, and the examination ran about two hours. The judge later ordered Bryan's testimony struck from the record.
The next day, the jury convicted Scopes. Bryan died suddenly five days after the trial ended.
What happened on appeal
The defense lost the larger argument. In a ruling issued in January 1927, the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the Butler Act. But it set aside Scopes's conviction on a technicality. The state constitution did not let judges set fines above $50, so the jury, not the judge, should have set the $100 fine. The chief justice suggested the case be dropped, and the state attorney general declined to retry it.
With no conviction left to appeal, the constitutional challenge ended there. Tennessee repealed the Butler Act in 1967. In 1968, in Epperson v. Arkansas, the Supreme Court ruled that bans on teaching evolution violate the First Amendment's Establishment Clause.
The lessons for trial lawyers
Scopes is a reminder that a criminal case can be a vehicle for a cause, and that the defendant's interests and the cause's interests do not always line up. A defense team that wants an appeal may not mind losing in front of the jury. It also showed how a winning appellate issue can come from a procedural detail rather than the big constitutional question.
The trial's legacy is still argued over. "The Scopes trial didn't start the 100-year culture war, but it made both sides realize how sharply divided we were," historian Adam Laats told NPR. The case was fictionalized in the 1955 play "Inherit the Wind," later a 1960 film.
Big trials and big crowds were not new even then, as our look back at the Lindbergh kidnapping trial shows, and they have not stopped, as the Michael Jackson trial in 2005 proved. It is the kind of courtroom history defense attorney Daniel Rosenberg and the Two Taps legal panel of Michael Dye and Lloyd Golburgh come back to on the show.
Two Taps News stories summarize reporting and the analysis discussed on Two Taps and Friends. They are not legal advice. Read our standards.
