Kenneth Lougee

This book won't tell you whether Joe Hill was guilty or innocent of murder. But it will tell you why he died.

Hill, as he called himself (he was born under a different name in Sweden), was the leading songwriter of the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, or Wobblies), who was convicted of murder and executed in Utah in 1915. It is an article of faith in labor circles that Hill was innocent. In fact there was significant reason to suspect him of the murder of which he was convicted. What is certain is that there was a murder, and that several men were involved; based on the testimony of the sole surviving witness, a child named Merlin Morrison, several people barged into his father's shop, and in the altercation which followed, Merlin's father and older brother were killed. Merlin was unable to identify the attackers, but he did believe that his older brother had shot and probably wounded one of them.

And there was Joe Hill, in the area, living without a real source of income (meaning that he needed to acquire money for living somehow) -- and with a bullet hole in his chest which he had acquired on the night of the robbery.

Proof? Of course not. Particularly since there were no witnesses to the robbery who could identify him and only one woman who claimed to have seen him in the vicinity. But it was genuinely enough reason to take Hill into custody and investigate further. Especially since he wouldn't explain what he was doing at the time of the murder.

It's what happened next that is disturbing. There was little investigation, and that not very good. Hill was put on trial anyway.

Hill had no money for lawyers, and this was a time when the right to counsel was not guaranteed. Two lawyers volunteered to represent him. He accepted (although he would later try to fire them for incompetence).

What followed was ugly. The prosecution presented their flimsy case. It was flimsy; they had very little evidence. But the prosecutor was a good lawyer. And he at least had some facts.

What Hill's lawyers had was a client who would not explain what he had been doing at the time of the murder, who had a wound consistent with the testimony of Merlin Morrison, who was a known radical although certainly not a violent radical. Good lawyers could have shown that the prosecution did not have evidence enough to offer proof, and probably would have offered alternative explanations. At minimum, they would have offered some facts the prosecution didn't have. They did none of this. Hill was convicted. Armed with a new lawyer, he appealed -- but he still offered no facts, so there was no real basis for the appeal. It was rejected, and Hill was shot.

Was Hill guilty? Unlike every other writer on the topic, Lougee doesn't even try to answer that. All he does is study the trial, and the actions of the lawyers. And his conclusion is clear: Hill's lawyers were incompetent and did not defend him properly. Had they been competent, they would have either gotten Hill off or forced the prosecution to come up with enough additional information to prove his guilt. They failed utterly, and Hill died as a result.

This book will not teach you all you need to know about the history of Hill's case. For that, you should probably start with the one unbiased book on the case, Joe Hill by Gibbs Smith. But Smith was not a lawyer. This book is a good supplement to Smith to explain what went wrong at trial. Once you've read Smith and this book, you can perhaps start on the rest of the literature, most of which (except for a work of fiction by Wallace Stegner) is pro-Hill. The best of the pro-Hill books is probably The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Joe Hill by William Adler, which makes the one serious attempt to find an alibi for Hill. Is it correct? I can't know. Do I think Hill innocent? I think it more likely than not, but I'm not sure. I wish I were. But I appreciate books like this that try to study the matter without prejudgment. So I recommend this for everyone interested in the Hill case.… (mais)