The Bathsheba Spooner Murder Trial
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Lore
The Bathsheba Spooner
Murder Trial
by Weyman I. Lundquist
In 1778, justice in America was fast,
if not certain. On July 2, 1778, four
people were hanged on the common in
Worcester, Massachusetts, for the
March 2, 1778, murder of Joshua
Spooner. But five died that day-
Bathsheba Spooner, the last woman to
be hanged in Worcester County, was
five months pregnant with a male child.
Despite advertisements from Wor-
cester officials that attending the execu-
tion would put them at risk of small-
pox, thousands of spectators assembled
for the hanging. Nature set the stage.
The Worcester Spy newspaper of July
3, 1778, captured the death scene:
There followed an awful half hour.
The loud shouts of the officers,
amidst a crowd of five thousand
people, to make way, make
way! the horses pressing upon
those in front; the shrieks of
women in the tumult and confu-
sion, the malefactors slowly
advancing to the fatal tree, pre-
ceded by the dismal coffins; the
fierce coruscations of lightning
athwart the darkened horizon,
quickly followed by loud peals of
thunder, conspired together and
produced a dreadful scene of hor-
ror. It seemed as if the Author of
nature had added such terrors to
the punishment of the criminals as
might soften the stoutest hearts of
the most obdurate and abandoned.
How did this come to pass? How would
the America of today have reacted to the
trial? And to the punishment? There is
one certainty: The five-month-old
Weyman I. Lundquist practices with the law
firm of Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe in San
Francisco, California, and Norwich, Vermont.
fetus would not have been killed. Even
taking into account the description by
Peleg W. Chandler in American Crimi-
nal Trials, vol. 2, (1844), of . . . the
excitement of the public mind upon the
subject [murder], and the unsettled con-
dition of the state governments [Revo-
lutionary or Loyalist] during the war of
revolution, the mores of that time did
not countenance such an action.
Today's test for the propriety of a
death sentence often begins with a look
at the lawyers' work, the adequacy of
representation. It is interesting to eval-
uate the lawyer's work even two hun-
dred years after the fact.
The Lawyers
The prosecution was handled by
Robert Treat Paine-formidable oppo-
nent by any test, 47 years of age, Har-
vard educated, signer of the Declara-
tion of Independence, theologian-
turned-lawyer, associate prosecutor in
the Boston Massacre trial, member of
Congress and Speaker of the Massa-
chusetts Assembly. By 1777, he was
elected the first attorney general of
Massachusetts (after declining appoint-
ment to the Massachusetts Superior
Court) and was involved with confis-
cating the estates of deported Loyalists.
It would not be far reaching to suggest
he had achieved many of the goals the
young defense lawyer, Levi Lincoln,
aspired to, and Paine may well have
held the keys to Lincoln's ambitions.
All four of the defendants, three of
them Loyalists, were represented by
Levi Lincoln. The defense of
Bathsheba Spooner, 32-year-old wife
of Joshua Spooner, mother of three
children, and Loyalist like her father,
General Timothy Ruggles, was handled
LITIGATION Spring 1998 5 7 Volume 24 Number 3](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/laba24&div=50&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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The Bathsheba Spooner Murder Trial
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