World of Criminal Justice on Bruno Richard Hauptmann
In 1932, the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's baby son shocked the world. A hero in the United States and Europe, Lindbergh had made a historic first crossing of the Atlantic by flying from New York to Paris only five years earlier. After discovering the infant's corpse, investigators failed to make progress on solving the case. Then, in 1934, the arrest, trial, and execution of a German-born carpenter, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, led to a frenzy that ultimately had a lasting impact on U.S. society and law. Although he protested his innocence, Hauptmann was reviled in the press, and his trial became a circus. Afterwards, trial reform was initiated to protect defendants, and Congress passed a tough anti-kidnapping law.
On March 1, 1932, the 21-month old son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh disappeared from the couple's affluent Hopewell, New Jersey home. A ladder found against the house had apparently carried the kidnapper up to the child's second-story nursery, where a ransom note demanding $50,000 was left. Attempts to contact the kidnapper through newspaper ads failed until a go-between delivered the ransom sum to a New York cemetery in April. Shockingly, in May, the child's corpse was found. The child had been killed soon after the abduction.
Two years later, the thirty-five-year-old Hauptmann was arrested after passing one of the ransom bills at a Bronx gas station. Police found a large amount of the ransom money hidden in his home, along with the phone number of the go-between. The suspect, moreover, had a criminal history of burglary, possession of stolen goods, and illegal entry into the United States.
Held between 1934 and 1935 in Flemington, New Jersey, Hauptmann's trial was a sensation. Nearly seven hundred reporters and photographers jammed the town. Flashbulbs popped throughout the trial, and a hidden newsreel camera secretly captured the proceedings. The media made order in the courtroom impossible, and even the Lindberghs, who had no privacy, developed a hatred for the press that later led them to move outside the country.
Denying any role in the Lindbergh kidnapping, Hauptmann claimed only to have held the money for a friend who returned to Germany. But prosecutors turned up more evidence--witnesses placed Hauptmann near the Lindbergh home around the time of the kidnapping, and the ladder had been repaired with wood from his attic. Hauptmann went to his death in the electric chair proclaiming his innocence.
Quickly after the trial, two key reforms followed in American law. First, the American Bar Association pushed states to ban photography in courtrooms on the grounds that it disrupts trials. Forty-eight states adopted the ban, and Congress also amended the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to ban cameras and broadcasting from federal courts. The photography ban lasted almost forty years. Second, lawmakers pushed through the nation's first tough anti-kidnapping legislation, popularly known as the Lindbergh law. Penalties under the statute, which made it a felony to kidnap someone with the intent to seek a ransom, were later increased on several occasions.
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