FINAL VERDICT
Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1962. First Edition. Hardcover. Inscribed and dated in the year of publication by Adela Rogers St. Johns to Sacramento attorney Alf Stavig on the front flyleaf. Octavo: [viii], 512 pp. Original blue and black cloth binding, with silver-stamped titling. Faint offsetting to the rear endpaper. Light rubbing to the corners and tips, with a little bit of edgewear to the dust jacket. Better than very good.
When Adela Rogers St. Johns - famed Hearst reporter, "Mother Confessor of Hollywood", screenwriter, and prolific author - published this account of the life of her father, the renowned Los Angeles criminal lawyer Earl Rogers, she was not the first. Almost 30 years before, AP reporter Al Cohen and attorney Joe Chisholm wrote the best-selling Take the Witness, for which Adela wrote the foreword. Rogers continues to attract attention today: in 2001, trial lawyer Michael Lance Trope published an account of Rogers' most famous cases in Once Upon a Time in Los Angeles.
Rogers (1869-1922), handsome, brilliant, and eloquent, was a legal pioneer: the first attorney to make use of the science of ballistics, more knowledgeable about anatomy than many coroners, a master of cross examination, and one of the first attorneys to popularize the use of blackboards and charts in the courtroom. Of the 77 major murder cases he handled, he lost only three. When Clarence Darrow was charged with jury bribery in 1912, he hired Rogers to defend him - and was acquitted. "With no movie or TV stars, no glamour boys in Washington, no real tie to New York, we created local idols," Adela wrote of turn-of-the-century Los Angeles. "Earl Rogers as political boss, courtroom star of sensational murder trials, was a bigger popular favorite than one man could be today in any city or state." Rogers also has the LAPD in his pocket after successfully defending three officers charged with manslaughter in 1904, Adela writes.
Final Verdict, however, is less a conventional biography and more of Adela's eyewitness account of the legal career of the father she adored, his ultimately unsuccessful struggle with alcohol, and her own wildly unorthodox childhood. "I don't quarrel with what has been said about my father," she writes. "Sometimes the writer knows only half the story, sees it from his side only, he has a right to his conclusions. My own are partisan with love for my father and that has not, it seems, dimmed through the years and I feel he has a right that this side of his story be told at last. Because he came to a bad end, often the truth and the record and the emotions behind it all have been obscured."
Near the end of his life, Adela sought to commit him involuntarily for treatment of his alcoholism, but broke down on the stand. The case was dismissed. Guilt over the episode was the "something [that] drove me to tell my father's story," she confesses. Adela ends the book with an acknowledgement of the therapeutic nature of her book. "I have forgiven Earl Rogers' daughter Nora [his pet nickname for her] at last. For as I've written it all out, here...I know now she did the best she could. I have forgiven her because...right or wrong, she loved much." Very good / Very good. Item #79983
Price: $350.00