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97 Judicature 298 (2013-2014)
Explaining Jury Duty for a Lay Audience

handle is hein.journals/judica97 and id is 298 raw text is: substitute a different body in his grave, collect the money, then split the proceeds. They refused to pay up, and Sallie Hillmon sued. The case was adjudicated no less than six times: 1882 (hung jury), 1885 (hung jury), 1888 (verdict for Sallie, but overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court), 1895 (hung jury), 1896 (hung jury), 1899 (verdict for Sallie but overturned by the Supreme Court). After 21 years of litigation, the exhausting affair finally ended with an out-of-court settlement in 1903. The key issue through all these years of changing lawyers, judges, and courts was simply whether or not Hillmon's grave contained Hillmon. The companies claimed that the corpse was that of Frederick Walters, a wandering cigarmaker; their evidence was a note written by Walters to a girlfriend back in Iowa saying that he planned to leave Wichita with a certain Mr. Hillmon, a sheep trader, for Colorado or parts unknown to me-after which he was never heard from again. The company lawyers introduced this Dearest Alvina letter into evidence at the first trial, but by the third trial Sallie's lawyers finally had cottoned to the fact that it was hearsay and thus inadmissible as evidence. The judge agreed. Sallie Hillmon's best rebuttal did not emerge until the sixth trial, when her lawyers put a Leavenworth cigar manufacturer, Arthur Simmons, on the stand. Simmons said-and had records backing it up-that he had briefly employed Walters two months after Walters purportedly died. Meanwhile, in 1892 the Supreme Court justices, in voiding the 1888 verdictfor Sallie, held thatthe Dearest Alvina letter was not hearsay, since it described the declarant's intentions. They therefore invented an entirely new exemption to the hearsay rule for out-of-court statements. Known ever since as the Hillmon rule, it is limited to the intentions, plans, and states of mind of declarants only, not to anybody else. How about the conflict between the Dearest Alvina letter and the tes- timony of Arthur Simmons? Profes- sor Wesson came to believe that the letter was a fraud, penned by Fred- erick Walters, true enough, but dic- tated by W. H. Buchan, an insurance company attorney. In return, Walters was promised a monthly salary for the rest of his life, so long as he dis- appeared, never revealed his true identity, and kept Buchan informed of his address. It could have hap- pened that way, writes Wesson. The longer I think about it, the more I believe it must have happened that way, more or less (p. 325). And what about the body in the grave? Like the crime novelist she is, Wesson decides to solve that mystery with a DNA test. She located a Hillmon descendent living in Montana, who agreed to contribute his DNA, and in 2006 she received permission to have the body exhumed by Profes- sor Dennis Van Gerven, an anthro- pologist from Boulder, aided by a few graduate students. Alas, the bones had been so scoured by ground water over the years that the extraction of useful DNA proved impossible. But Wesson had one more string to her bow. Three years earlier, at the National Archives branch in Kansas City, she had discovered in the Supreme Court files for Hillmon a trove of seven photographs: two studio portraits of Frederick Walters, three of John Hillmon, and-most importantly-two (front and profile) of the corpse briefly displayed at Lawrence in 1879. Ingenious pho- toshop work by Van Gerven, super- imposing the corpse's facial profile against the facial frontal view of Walters, then of Hillmon, effectively demonstrated that the corpse could not have been Walters. In the absence of any other candidates, it must have been John Hillmon, just as the deter- mined Sallie had maintained for so many years. Mystery solved and Sallie Hillmon vindicated after more than a century. Unfortunately, says Wesson, the rule of law rising out of the case, the Hillmon exception, lives on, even though based on fraudulent, or at least very questionable, evidence. * ROBERT R. DYKSTRA is Emeritus Professor of History and Public Policy, SUNY Albany. He is the author of two books on frontier society and politics and, with Jo Ann Manfra, is completing a third, Getting' Out of Dodge: Homicide, Moral Discourse, Cultural Identity. (dykstra39@charter.net) Explaining Jury Duty for a Lay Audience by CINDY SIMMONS Why Jury Duty Matters: A Citizen's Guide to Constitutional Action by Andrew Guthrie Ferguson. New York University Press, 2012. 224 pages. $60.00. Andrew Guthrie Ferguson's book Why Jury Duty Matters provides a useful education for those called for jury duty who want to deeply under- stand their power as jurors. It also gives a very readable history of the American jury system and provides an explanation of how the jury fits into the structure of our democracy. In a casual style, Ferguson, a law professor at the University of the Dis- trict of Columbia, walks the reader through what the law requires of jurors, drawing heavily from his experience as a public defender in Washington, D.C. In the chapter on deliberation, for instance, he writes that most of the jurors he talked to after his cases were proud of the decision. Among the tips he gleaned from those interviews: Happy jurors recognize that the final decision will build on their ideas, but will not be their idea. The collaborative nature of the process almost always shapes the end result; and happy jurors recognize that the differences in 298 JUICATE * MAY / JUNE 2014 * VOL 97 NO 6

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