Harrison Stutts Acquitted
Just as the hand of the clock were approaching the witching hour of midnight, on Friday last, 12 grave and earnest jurymen and jurywomen, bowed with the weight of their great responsibility, filed into the courtroom at Pinehurst and announced to H.R. Vroom, Clerk of the Court, that they had, each and all of them, found one O.H. Stutts NOT GUILTY of the charge upon which he had been tried, to wit, swiping a tire from the off rear wheel of the automobile of one Bert Wicker while said Wicker was attending the movies at the Carolina Theatre on Friday night, September 15th, Anno Domini 1922.
That’s a good, long, healthy sentence but it isn’t a patch on the one that hung over the head of the terrified prisoner, like the sword of Damocles, during the long hours of the highly interesting and amusing Mock Trial staged that night at the Community Hall by the Community Club of Pinehurst. The trial was presided over by Judge R.A. Barrett, who was armed with a mighty 50-pound sledge hammer which he called a gavel and with a still more ponderous collection of judicial opinions and rulings, several of which had some bearing on the case at bar. The presiding judge’s manful efforts to maintain, by pounding the bench with his sledgehammer, a respectful atmosphere of attentive silence among the vast assemblage which packed the Hall to its capacity, were ably seconded and enforced by the Sheriff, Fuller T. Currie, who was also called upon to summons the jurors and witnesses and to keep a vigilant eye on the dangerous prisoner.
Will Fry, Court Crier, opened the proceedings with the familiar Oyez, Oyez and its accompanying invocation. Judge Barrett called the crowded court-room to order. Clerk Vroom read the indictment. Hon. A.M. Davis, Solicitor for the State, then presented the State’s case, which was in brief that after Mr. Wicker had parked his car opposite the Carolina Theatre on the night of September 15, and had entered the theatre, O.H. Stutts had been seen hanging around the car in a suspicious manner and that shortly afterwards one of its rear tires had been found sadly and entirely lacking. That said, Stutts had, on the day before, tried to buy a second-hand tire at the lumber yard, the post office and at other places where tires are usually sold. That, on the night of the crime, he had endeavored to sell at 32 by 4 tire the size used on Mr. Wicker’s car, to a local Ford owner. That failing in his argument that it was just as good as a Ford size and a lot bigger, he had secreted the tire behind a barrel in his (Stutts’s) garage, where no spare tire had ever been seen before. That the tire had been discovered there by one of the State’s witnesses and subsequently identified and gathered in by Mr. Wicker.
Evidence in support of the correctness of these allegations and relating to many other suspicious circumstances to which space will not allow us to refer to, was offered by the State’s witnesses, including Gordon M. Cameron, J. Bruce Cameron, Frank Maples, A.B. Sally, J.A. McDowald, Charlie Fields and Berk Wicker, the car, in front of the movie house, in full view of the entering crowd, some 5 or 10 minutes before the car arrived there. But aside from these little injuries to the State’s case it was left intact in its essential details and, when the State rested, Mr. Cason’s motion to dismiss was overruled by Judge Barrett almost before it was made.
The witnesses offered for the defense were J.F. Craig, Ellis Fields, Floyd Medlin, True Cheney, Colin McKensie and George Woods, the last named being the only character witness produced for the defense. Mr. Woods’ evidence, while favorable to Mr. Stutts to the extent that he had known Stutts for eight years and had never yet seen him actually stealing an automobile tire, was somewhat weakened complaining witness.
The defense was ably conducted by Hon. J.F. Gardner, who started out with a vain attempt to secure an adjournment on the ground of the absence of two important witnesses, though one of whom the defense expected to prove that the tire was not worth stealing and, through the other, to show that Mr. Wicker and his car had not gone to the movies at all on the night in question. Over-ruled on this motion, Mr. Cason turned his vigorous attention to fiercely assailing in cross-examination, the evidence and the credibility of the witnesses for the State. He forced an admission from two of them that they were plumbers. He led others into a maze of contradictory statements. He made it appear likely that if the tire had been stolen at all or had ever existed, it must have been removed from ?? the by crafty precaution taken beforehand by Counsel for the State, who had taken pains to elicit from each of the State’s witnesses that he had never heard of any such man as George Woods in his life and didn’t want to and by the fact (elicited from Mr. Woods by the State, on cross examination) that the witness did not know anybody else who knew anything about the prisoner or the prisoner’s character.
Others of the defense’s witnesses swore to an assemblage of first-class facts or alleged facts in contravention of the State’s case. The jury was given a large number of defenses to choose from. There were enough of them to go around. Among them was the statement that Mr. Stutts did not leave his house on the night of the crime, while others showed he was in the movie house when the felonious deed was committed. Further, evidence was offered to show that the spare tire discovered in his garage after the date of the theft had been there right along for weeks; and that none had been there or had been discovered there after the theft; and that the tire found there after the theft had been deliberately planted there by a revengeful colored boy who had recently been fired by Stutts. Further, that Mr. Stutts had never been known to grab anybody else’s tire when they didn’t fit his own car. Taking it altogether, it was a mighty complete, all round defense, and if each of the jurors had thoroughly believed all of the evidence tendered by any one of these witnesses the jury would doubtlessly have returned a verdict of acquittal without leaving the box.
However, after Judge Barrett had passed the buck to the jury by turning them loose on the case without any judicial comment on the evidence offered by either side, the jurors took a long time to reach their verdict. Rumors, which your correspondent has as yet been unable to verify, have it that the jury stood 9 to 3 in favor of conviction on its first ballot and finally compromised on a verdict of mains ?? that Harrison Stutts was “not guilty on the ground of insanity.” And that the foreman of the jury was swerved from the strict path of duty, after re-entering the courtroom, by the sight of a half dozen of the prisoner’s grandchildren prattling together on a front bench, and delivered the Not Guilty part of the verdict without the insanity rider.
Be all that as it may, the fact recharged by the court and walked out of the courtroom without a stain on his character beyond the one incurred through his own admission, when on the stand, that he had been leading a double life, secretly caddying for Bruce Cameron as an active vocation and lending an occasional hand at unloading bricks at the Pinehurst Warehouse on the side, as it were.
From the front page of The Sandhill Citizen, Southern Pines, N.C., Friday, Oct 27, 1922
