When we left off in Part 1, I sketched out a hypothetical murder scenario. The features of the story that forms the basis of Commonwealth v. Knapp are similar to—but quite a bit more complicated than—those of that hypothetical.
John Francis Knapp (Frank) and Joseph Jenkins Knapp (Joseph) were brothers. They had a wealthy uncle, Captain Joseph White, who was 82 years old at the time. At the risk of oversimplification, the brothers believed that they could have their uncle killed, steal his will, and then inherit sooner and in a greater amount than if he were to die with a will in place and of natural causes. (As it turned out, they were wrong about Massachusetts inheritance laws, and they destroyed a will that had been superseded). In any event, they hired a hit man, Richard Crowninshield (perhaps along with his brother, George), to murder Captain White.
One night, Richard Crowninshield broke into Captain White’s house through a window that Joseph had unlocked, crept to his bedroom, and then clubbed and stabbed him as he slept. Frank and/or Joseph Knapp waited in the street outside and helped Crowninshield escape and hide one of the murder weapons. For a couple of months, the case remained unsolved. But then, a (jailed) informant came forward and told of a plot to rob Captain White that he had overheard in a tavern. On the strength of this report, the Crowninshield brothers and two others were arrested. Although Richard did not inform on the Knapps, he had told at least one of his criminal associates about the murder and its participants. One of them, John Palmer, seized on what he saw as an opportunity for profit and sent a blackmail letter to the boys’ father, who passed it on to the authorities, who in turn arrested the Knapp brothers.
After this, Joseph Knapp confessed and Richard Crowninshield hung himself in his jail cell. After Crowninshield’s suicide, the case presented prosecutorial difficulties under the Massachusetts law of the time. This was so because an accessory could only be convicted after a principal had been convicted. Thus, one of the Knapps would have to be tried as a principal, which could only be accomplished by showing that he procured the murder and was “present” at its commission. As a further complicating factor, the case against Frank was largely circumstantial. Frank was tried first, initially to a hung jury. The second trial, which is our object of study, resulted in Frank’s conviction and ultimate execution. Later, Joseph was tried and convicted; George Crowninshield was acquitted.
The most interesting tack that Daniel Webster takes in his prosecutorial summation in Knapp is to offer—right after he establishes his bona fides—a third-person omniscient narrative of the actual crime:
An aged man, without an enemy in the world, in his own house, and in his own bed, is made the victim of a butcherly murder, for mere pay. The deed was executed with a degree of self-possession and steadiness equal to the wickedness with which it was planned. The circumstances, now clearly in evidence, spread out the whole scene before us. Deep sleep had fallen on the destined victim, and on all beneath his roof. A healthful old man, to whom sleep was sweet, the first sound slumbers of the night held him in their soft but strong embrace. The assassin enters, through the window already prepared, into an unoccupied apartment.
With noiseless foot he paces the lonely hall, half lighted by the moon; he winds up the ascent of the stairs, and reaches the door of the chamber. Of this, he moves the lock, by soft and continued pressure, till it turns on its hinges without noise; and he enters, and beholds his victim before him. The room was uncommonly open to the admission of light. The face of the innocent sleeper was turned from the murderer, and the beams of the moon, resting on the gray locks of his aged temple, showed him where to strike. The fatal blow is given! And the victim passes, without a struggle or a motion, from the repose of sleep to the repose of death!
This narration has all the hallmarks of fiction: pacing, colorful diction, effective use of tropes and other rhetorical devises like alliteration, and—above all—a recitation of “facts” (internal states of mind, sweeping generalization) that could not be (despite a statement to the contrary) “clearly in evidence.” What Webster has crafted is a framed, exemplary narrative, one that he recognizes as such (he even calls it an “example”) and one that he expects the jury to use as a yardstick against which to measure and a framework upon which to hang the unorganized discourse that it has heard throughout the trial and that Webster will set about to recast in narrative form. What remains to be seen is how the presently constructed frame tale will aid the jury in processing evidence from the very recent past (i.e., from the trial) to understand what happened in the deeper past of the actual murder.
Just as a moviegoer must act on a series of cues subliminally signaling that her brain must unconsciously run certain “procedural schemas” that will allow her to transform discourse into narrative, so must a juror match the unanchored discourse of trial to her storehouse of real-world experiences and beliefs. This entails several things, the most of important of which is the ordering of temporal and causal relationships. And one way for a lawyer to manipulate this process is to provide the jurors with a prototype or exemplary narrative to serve as a framework within which to fit bits of discourse and to assess the story that they begin to develop. Webster does this in two ways: First, he invokes a classic “usurpation” narrative (King Lear) and, second, he deploys the frame tale that we’ve just begun to examine. But the question remains, how and why does this frame tale work?
Framed narration is one of the oldest devices in literature: Familiar examples range across cultures and time from 1001 Nights, to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, to ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’ in Scott’s Redgauntlet, to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Embedded narratives of this sort have attracted a fair amount of critical attention in recent years, and this work has done much to account for the forms and functions of stories within stories. Here, I would like to draw on just one of the many insights coming out of this research and scholarship: namely, the notion that—as David Herman (using Wordsworth’s “Ruined Cottage” as a tutor text) puts it—“framed narratives function as both models for and vehicles of shared thinking, or socially distributed cognition.”
What Herman means by this is that framed narratives act as tools that can aid or enhance thinking. Webster intuits this possibility by moving beyond the mere speech reports offered during the evidentiary phase of the trial and builds a representation of the various states of mind of both victim and victimizers. This sets the stage for Webster’s ultimate summation, in which he tells the jury how the story he has told has affected him (“I think … I think … I think”) and what conclusions the jury should draw from what they have heard (“you cannot doubt … you cannot doubt …” etc.). Webster’s closing thus reflexively identifies narrative as a device for identifying with or recoiling from the minds of others.
There’s much to untangle here, including a consideration of whether jurors recognize the performance of closing argument as one of a narrator. And, if they do, how do they distinguish reliable from unreliable narrators? By the same sort of cues that lead us to distrust Nabokov, Kesey, or Bret Ellis’s narrators? Other things? Do evidentiary and other rules act as (effective) dampers in this connection? These are all interesting questions, and we’ll provide at least partial answers to some of them by returning to the subject of motive next time.
Randy D. Gordon is the office managing partner of the Dallas office of Duane Morris LLP. He is executive professor of law and history at Texas A&M University. His new book project, “The Performance of Law: Everyday Lawyering at the Intersection of Advocacy and Imagination,” from which this series is partially excerpted, will soon be published by Routledge.
Reprinted with permission from © ALM Media Properties LLC. All rights reserved.
