Transcript
Nicole Fire (0:01)
We interrupt this program to bring you an important Wayfair message. Wayfair's got Style tips for Every home. This is Nicole Fire helping you make those rooms Flyer Today's Style Tip when it comes to making a statement, treat bold patterns like neutrals. Go wild like an untamed animal. Print area rug under a rustic farmhouse table. From wayfair.com Ooh, fierce. This has been your Wayfair style tip to keep those interiors superior.
Wayfair Voice (0:27)
Wayfair Every style, Every home the Rest.
Paul Harvey (0:30)
Of the Story Television began as entertainment. It was in the middle of the 1950s that there emerged a new facet to this promising young medium, public Conscience. CBS had a series called Odyssey. Back then, one particular chapter of Odyssey reenacted a controversial conspiracy trial. And such was the power of that program that a real life case was subsequently legally reviewed. But I'm getting ahead of myself. This is the rest of the story. In the spring of 1957, a conspiracy case came up for review before the Massachusetts state legislature. There were six conspirators. None of the defendants was a United States citizen. All had been tried. All had been found guilty in a lower court. A television program was directly responsible for renewed national interest in this conspiracy case, a chapter of the CBS series called Odyssey. What the producers did was to reenact the trial on the basis of courtroom transcripts and testimony, and so forth. The program attracted the attention of the Joint Constitutional Law Committee in the Massachusetts State House of Representatives. The committee requested that CBS turn over a kinescope reproduction of the show. CBS complied, and the committee, in the privacy of a darkened hearing room, viewed that controversial trial. And when the trial dramatization was finished, United States Senator Leverett Salton Stall appeared on the screen. The legislators listened intently as the senator decried the use of flimsy evidence and faulty legal procedures in general. And when the lights went on, those respected lawmakers concluded the conspirators had been innocent, not guilty. The state legislature should immediately move to exonerate them. The committee's recommendation was put to a voice vote in the lower house was passed quickly, a few legal objections arose. Lawyers outside the legislature cited the six defendants were all British subjects, thereby were subject to the laws of Britain, and if the British courts were unwilling to review the case, it should be a matter for the United Nations General Assembly. But meanwhile, the lower house proposal to clear the conspirators came before the Massachusetts State Senate. The case was studied, and two months later the Senate voted to concur with the lower house, and the recommendation was approved and signed by the governor of Massachusetts, Anne Prudater and Bridget Bishop, Susanna Martin and Alice Parker and Margaret Scott, and a man named Wilmot Reed. All six conspirators were officially legally declared innocent. Not that it made much difference to them. You will recall, they had already been tried and convicted by the time the Massachusetts state legislature reviewed their case. They had also been executed. In fact, they had already been dead for 265 years. 265 years. So the six defendants were belatedly exonerated as a token gesture in response to a televised reenactment of a trial which took place in 1692. For back then, the verdict of the Colonial Court had been guilty of conspiracy with the devil. What that meant was conspiracy to commit witchcraft. Now you know the rest of the story.