Earl Rogers (November 18, 1869 – February 22, 1922) was an
American
American(s) may refer to:
* American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America"
** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America
** American ancestry, pe ...
trial lawyer and professor, who later became the inspiration for
Perry Mason
Perry Mason is a fictional character, an American criminal defense lawyer who is the main character in works of detective fiction written by Erle Stanley Gardner. Perry Mason features in 82 novels and 4 short stories, all of which involve a c ...
.
Life
Earl Rogers was born in
Perry, New York
Perry is a town in Wyoming County, New York, United States. The population was 4,616 at the 2010 census. The town is named after Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry.
The town is on the eastern border of the county. Perry is also the name of a village ...
on November 18, 1869, the son of
Methodist
Methodism, also called the Methodist movement, is a group of historically related denominations of Protestant Christianity whose origins, doctrine and practice derive from the life and teachings of John Wesley. George Whitefield and John's b ...
minister Lowell L. Rogers and Ada (Andrus) Rogers. The Reverend Rogers moved the Rogers family to
California
California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...
in 1874. Rogers attended
Ashland Academy in
Ashland, Oregon
Ashland is a city in Jackson County, Oregon, United States. It lies along Interstate 5 approximately 16 miles (26 km) north of the California border and near the south end of the Rogue Valley. The city's population was 21,360 at the 2020 cen ...
and St. Helena Academy in
St. Helena, California
St. Helena ( ; Wappo language, Wappo: ''Anakotanoma'') is a city in Napa County, California, Napa County, in the Wine Country of California. Located in the North Bay (San Francisco Bay Area), North Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the ...
. He then studied at
Syracuse University
Syracuse University (informally 'Cuse or SU) is a Private university, private research university in Syracuse, New York. Established in 1870 with roots in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the university has been nonsectarian since 1920. Locate ...
, but left to return to California after his father went bankrupt.
Rogers worked as a newspaper reporter, then
studied law under former U.S. senator
Stephen M. White and Judge William P. Gardiner. Rogers was
admitted to the bar
An admission to practice law is acquired when a lawyer receives a license to practice law. In jurisdictions with two types of lawyer, as with barristers and solicitors, barristers must gain admission to the bar whereas for solicitors there are dist ...
in 1897, and began to practice in
Los Angeles
Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world' ...
. Among the prospective attorneys who studied law under Rogers was
Buron Fitts
Buron Rogers Fitts (March 22, 1895 – March 29, 1973) was the 29th lieutenant governor of California, from 1927 to 1928, and Los Angeles County district attorney thereafter until 1940.
Early life
Born in Belcherville, Texas, Fitts received h ...
, who later became a Los Angeles County district attorney.
As a defense counsel, Rogers handled 77 murder trials and lost only three . He astonished medical experts on the witness stand with his technical questions . His expertise was so complete that he became a professor of medical jurisprudence and insanity in the
College of Physicians and Surgeons as well as a professor at the
University of Southern California Law School
The USC Gould School of Law, located in Los Angeles, California, is the law school of the University of Southern California. The oldest law school in the Southwestern United States, USC Law traces its beginnings to 1896 and became affiliated with ...
. In "The Case of the Grinning Skull," Rogers introduced the victim's skull to prove what appeared to be a fracture caused by a violent blow from a blunt instrument, in fact, was the result of the autopsy surgeon's carelessness. The jury returned a not guilty verdict.
Ten years after his death, impressed with accounts of Rogers' cases, attorney and author
Erle Stanley Gardner
Erle Stanley Gardner (July 17, 1889 – March 11, 1970) was an American lawyer and author. He is best known for the Perry Mason series of crime fiction, detective stories, but he wrote numerous other novels and shorter pieces and also a series of ...
reincarnated Rogers as the character
Perry Mason
Perry Mason is a fictional character, an American criminal defense lawyer who is the main character in works of detective fiction written by Erle Stanley Gardner. Perry Mason features in 82 novels and 4 short stories, all of which involve a c ...
. Earl Rogers's life is recounted by his daughter
Adela Rogers St. Johns
Adela Nora Rogers St. Johns (May 20, 1894 – August 10, 1988) was an American journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. She wrote a number of screenplays for silent movies but is best remembered for her groundbreaking exploits as "The World's Grea ...
, who was his assistant for most of his legal career, in her book ''
Final Verdict
''Final Verdict'' (1991) is a TNT drama film starring Treat Williams, Olivia Burnette and Glenn Ford. It was directed by Jack Fisk. The movie is based on the 1962 biography of the same title by Hearst journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns. The bo ...
'' (Doubleday, 1962), which was the basis of the television film ''Final Verdict'', that was produced by Warner Bros.
Notable cases
William Alford, 1899
Rogers defended William Alford from a murder charge by entering the victim's intestines into evidence. An expert witness testified that the path of the bullet confirmed Alford's story .
Charles F. Mootry, 1899
Rogers defended Charles F. Mootry from a charge of murdering his wife by appealing to the jurors' own feelings about their wives. After the trial, when Mootry tried to congratulate Rogers, he turned away from Mootry and said, "Get away from me, you slimy pimp; you're as guilty as hell and you know it."
The Catalina Island murder 1902
Rogers is also remembered for the defense in the
Catalina Island murder case. In the early morning of August 13, 1902 at the Metropole Hotel, a gambler, William A. Yeagar, better known as "the Louisville Sport," was murdered during a card game. Alfred Boyd was one of three men in the room playing poker. Harry Johnson, who was at the table, ran from the room, yelling "He shot him, he shot him!" and handed Boyd's gun to bartender Jim Davis, who thought that there was no question that Boyd was the killer. Boyd was charged with the murder, but Rogers won an acquittal..
Griffith J. Griffith, 1903
Colonel
Griffith J. Griffith
Griffith Jenkins Griffith (January 4, 1850 – July 6, 1919) was a Welsh-born American industrialist and philanthropist. After amassing a significant fortune from a mining syndicate in the 1880s, Griffith donated to the City of Los Angeles wh ...
, the namesake of
Griffith Park
Griffith Park is a large municipal park at the eastern end of the Santa Monica Mountains, in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. The park includes popular attractions such as the Los Angeles Zoo, the Autry Museum of the Ameri ...
, was tried for the attempted murder of his wife. He was convicted of the lesser charge of assault with a deadly weapon and served two years in prison.
Morrison Buck, 1906
In 1906, Rogers made one of his rare appearances for the prosecution and used his medical expertise to send Morris Buck to the gallows for the murder of Chloe Canfield, wife of
Charles A. Canfield (1848-1913).
Patrick Calhoun 1909
Patrick Calhoun
Patrick Calhoun (March 21, 1856 – June 16, 1943) was the grandson of John C. Calhoun and Floride Calhoun, and the great-grandson of his namesake Patrick Calhoun. He is best known as a railroad baron of the late 19th century, and as the found ...
, president of the United Railroad Company, was charged with bribing the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in exchange for granting the overhead trolley franchise to his company in the wake of the
1906 San Francisco earthquake
At 05:12 Pacific Standard Time on Wednesday, April 18, 1906, the coast of Northern California was struck by a major earthquake with an estimated moment magnitude of 7.9 and a maximum Mercalli intensity of XI (''Extreme''). High-intensity sha ...
. Rogers defended Calhoun, but during his trials and all the related trials of United Railroad Company's general counsel, Tiery Ford, Rogers did not call a single witness nor introduce any evidence, arguing that the prosecution simply hadn't made a case against the defendants. On June 20, 1909, the Calhoun jury was deadlocked, with the final jury vote at ten for acquittal and two for conviction. He was not retried.
Clarence Darrow, 1912-1913
Perhaps the most famous lawyer-client disagreements recorded in legal history were those which developed between
Clarence Darrow
Clarence Seward Darrow (; April 18, 1857 – March 13, 1938) was an American lawyer who became famous in the early 20th century for his involvement in the Leopold and Loeb murder trial and the Scopes "Monkey" Trial. He was a leading member of t ...
, indicted for attempted jury bribery in Los Angeles in 1912, and Earl Rogers. The case arose out of Darrow's defense of
the McNamara brothers
The ''Los Angeles Times'' bombing was the purposeful dynamite, dynamiting of the Times Mirror Square, ''Los Angeles Times'' Building in Los Angeles, California, United States, on October 1, 1910, by a trade union, union member belonging to the In ...
, labor leaders who were indicted in the 1910 dynamiting of the ''
Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...
'' building, in which 21 ''Times'' non-union employees were killed.
The McNamara brothers were indicted, and Clarence Darrow was brought in to defend them. The case gripped the attention of the entire nation. Before the McNamara brothers could plead guilty, however, Darrow himself was charged by the Los Angeles district attorney with an attempt to bribe a juror. Darrow then hired Rogers as his chief counsel.
When the case went to trial, however, Darrow frequently disagreed with his attorney over how the case should be tried. According to the account of Adela Rogers St. Johns, much of her father's energy during the trial was given over to trying to persuade Darrow and his wife to accept his position on how to try the case.
Rogers was successful in getting Darrow, the great champion of organized labor, to refrain from making an argument essentially condoning the dynamiting of the ''Times'' building and the killing of 21 people. Rogers and Darrow both made closing arguments. Rogers' short summary of the evidence was business-like and to the point, emphasizing his own theory of the case that Darrow was too smart to have been involved in a bribery scheme and that he would not in any event have knowingly run across the street at the scene of the bribery and thus drawn attention to his presence at the scene.
Darrow was acquitted, but he was later indicted for allegedly attempting to bribe another juror in the McNamara case. Rogers began the second case as lead counsel but was soon forced to withdraw for health reasons. The second bribery trial ended in a hung jury, with several jurors holding out for a conviction.
It was not until many months later that the second indictment was finally dismissed, based on Darrow's agreement never to practice law in California again. The most difficult advocating that Earl Rogers faced in the Darrow case was to persuade Darrow not to continually hurt his own case with unappealing – if not suicidal – arguments."
The actor
Robert Vaughn
Robert Francis Vaughn (November 22, 1932 – November 11, 2016) was an American actor noted for his stage, film and television work. His television roles include the spy Napoleon Solo in the 1960s series ''The Man from U.N.C.L.E.''; the ...
played Rogers in the episode, "Defendant: Clarence Darrow" (January 13, 1963), of the
CBS
CBS Broadcasting Inc., commonly shortened to CBS, the abbreviation of its former legal name Columbia Broadcasting System, is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the CBS Entertainm ...
anthology series
An anthology series is a radio, television, video game or film series that spans different genres and presents a different story and a different set of characters in each different episode, season, segment, or short. These usually have a differ ...
, ''
GE True
''GE True'' (also known as ''General Electric True'') is a 33-episode, American anthology series sponsored by General Electric. Telecast on CBS, the series presented stories previously published in ''True'' magazine. Articles from the magazine ...
'', hosted by
Jack Webb
John Randolph Webb (April 2, 1920 – December 23, 1982) was an American actor, television producer, Television director, director, and screenwriter, who is most famous for his role as Joe Friday, Sgt. Joe Friday in the Dragnet (franchise) ...
. In the story line, Darrow, played by
Tol Avery
Taliaferro Ware "Tol" Avery (August 28, 1915 – August 27, 1973) was an American film and television character actor with more than a hundred screen appearances between 1950 and 1974.
Biography
Early in his career, Avery appeared as "Dennison ...
, and Rogers argue passionately over legal procedures.
Jess Willard 1913
Rogers defended boxer
Jess Willard
Jess Myron Willard (December 29, 1881 – December 15, 1968) was an American world heavyweight boxing champion billed as the Pottawatomie Giant who knocked out Jack Johnson in April 1915 for the heavyweight title. Willard was known for size rat ...
on charges of second-degree murder stemming from the death of his opponent, John "Bull" Young, from a blow to the head in the ninth round of a boxing match on August 22, 1913. On January 13, 1914, a jury found Willard not guilty. Willard later went on to become heavyweight champion of the world.
Charles E. Sebastian, 1916
Rogers successfully defended Los Angeles Police Chief
Charles E. Sebastian, who later became mayor, against a charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
While running for the mayor's office Sebastian was charged with many crimes but was later acquitted of all of them. However, he left City Hall on September 2, 1916, after adverse publicity concerning his personal life arose from the publication of several letters of a damaging nature, and Earl Rogers ran the mayor's office until
Frederick T. Woodman was appointed acting mayor on September 5, 1916.
References
*
*St. Johns, Adela Rogers, ''Final Verdict'', (Doubleday, 1962)
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rogers, Earl
1869 births
1922 deaths
California lawyers
Criminal defense lawyers
Trial lawyers
Lawyers from Buffalo, New York
Burials at Evergreen Cemetery, Los Angeles
19th-century American lawyers
People from Perry, New York
Southern Oregon University alumni
Lawyers from Los Angeles