Scopes Monkey Trial: The Defense Asked for a Guilty Verdict

What did the indictment charge, and what did the witnesses say?

The act became law on March 21, 1925 (Exhibit A, p. 5). Its first section made it unlawful for a teacher in a state-funded school “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals” (p. 5). Scopes was first indicted on May 25, 1925. Because of “some uncertainty” about that indictment, the judge called a new grand jury on the trial's first morning, July 10, and it returned a new one (pp. 4, 7).

The indictment, as the judge read it to the jury, charged that Scopes taught the forbidden theory on April 24, 1925, in the public schools of Rhea County (p. 309). Walter White, the superintendent of schools, testified that Scopes taught “Hunter’s biology” and that the warrant was sworn out on May 5 (p. 120). The book was George William Hunter's A Civic Biology of 1914, which tells students that “Evolution means change” and arranges animals from one-celled forms up to “a group which contains man himself” (Exhibit C, p. 194).

The state's main witness on the teaching itself was Howard Morgan, a student who gave his age as 14. He said Scopes had taught that “there was a little germ of one cell organism formed” and that it kept evolving until “from this was man” (Exhibit A, p. 126). Asked which book the class was using, he named a General Science book, and said he could not find the lesson in it (pp. 126–127). Scopes himself did not testify; Darrow told the jury on the last day that Scopes “could not deny the statements made by the boys” (p. 311).

John R. Neal, the defense lawyer who entered the plea of not guilty for Scopes on July 15 (Exhibit A, p. 112), and John T. Scopes, right, in a Bain News Service photograph of 1925. The negative names both men and is dated 7/10/25, the day the trial opened.

How did the eight days in court run?

The trial ran from Friday, July 10, to Tuesday, July 21, 1925: twelve calendar days, with the court sitting on eight of them and on neither weekend. The report fills 317 pages for those eight days, from page 3 to page 319, counting the blank and picture pages that fall between one day and the next. Monday, July 20, alone takes 94 of them. That day holds the defense statements read into the record as well as Darrow's examination of Bryan.

The report is a record with its own limits. Its publisher says it gives the case “from the court record as it was made from day to day,” used the Chattanooga Times's copy of the transcript, and added “some of the headings and sub-heads” (Exhibit A, publisher's note). On the last day, defense lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays told the judge that, after so much confusion, “there may be a chance of having some of it missing” (p. 314).

The headings quoted on this page are the publisher's. The words of the court are the stenographer's. The book also prints Bryan's examination in full, though the judge struck it the next morning, so it is a publisher's record of what was said in court, not the court's own certified record.

One bar per day in court, measured in pages of the 1925 stenographic report (Exhibit A); dashed lines mark the two weekends without a session. Each day's pages run to the page before the next day's chapter, so a few blank and picture pages are counted. Drawn from the table of court days published with this page.

The eight court days, one row per day (CSV) (where the data comes from) Data: The World's Most Famous Court Trial: Tennessee Evolution Case (Cincinnati: National Book Company, 1925)

The two rulings that shaped the end came on the fourth and sixth days. On July 15 the judge refused to quash the indictment (pp. 100–108), and on July 17 he excluded the scientists the defense had brought as expert witnesses (p. 201). After that, as the judge put it on the last morning, the only question left was whether Scopes had taught “that man descended from a lower order of animals” (p. 305).

What did Bryan say about layers of rock?

On Monday, July 20, the judge moved the court outside, saying: “I am afraid of the building. The court will convene down in the yard” (Exhibit A, p. 229). Any jurors present were told to retire, and the defense read statements from scientists and Bible scholars into the record. Then the defense called Bryan himself, and Darrow questioned him (p. 284).

Darrow asked: “Mr. Bryan, could you tell me how old the earth is?” Bryan answered: “No, sir, I couldn’t” (p. 296). When Darrow pressed him for a scientist he respected, Bryan named George M. Price, a “Professor of geology in a college” (p. 297).

A few questions later, Darrow told the court that Price was “a montebank and a pretender and not a geologist at all” (p. 297), which is one lawyer's charge in court, not a finding. Asked how old Price said the earth was, Bryan first said he had not examined the book to answer that. Pressed again, he said Price “speaks of the layers that are supposed to measure age” and that “attempts to measure age by those layers where they are not in the order in which they are usually found makes it difficult to fix the exact age” (p. 297).

Layers out of their usual order are also a problem archaeologists meet on their own sites, and they treat it as a sign of later disturbance to explain rather than a reason to give up on order. The stratigraphy page shows how diggers explain layers found out of order, and it quotes this same exchange. The stenographer also recorded the crowd: Bryan's line “You cannot measure the length of my answer by the length of your question” drew “Laughter in the courtyard” (p. 286).

William Jennings Bryan, in a newspaper halftone that its archive record credits to United News Pictures and places at the Dayton trial of 1925; the picture itself carries no caption. He testified on July 20 and died on July 26 (Exhibit F).

The next morning the judge took it all back. He said he feared he “may have committed error on yesterday” and that Bryan's testimony “can shed no light upon any issues that will be pending before the higher courts,” and he struck it from the record (p. 305). Bryan told the court, “I fully agree with the court that the testimony taken yesterday was not legitimate or proper” (p. 307). Asked whether the questions went too, the judge answered, “I expunged the whole proceedings” (p. 307).

Why did the defense ask for a guilty verdict?

With the experts excluded and Bryan's testimony struck, Darrow told the court: “we have no witnesses to offer, no proof to offer on the issues that the court has laid down here” (Exhibit A, p. 306). He went on: “we will ask the court to bring in the jury and instruct the jury to find the defendant guilty” (p. 306). The attorney general, A. T. Stewart, accepted the suggestion. Out of the jury's hearing, Darrow added that the request “was not made as a plea of guilty or an admission of guilt” but as the way to reach “the higher court” (p. 308).

The judge then read his charge. The act set a fine of not less than $100 and not more than $500, and he told the jurors: “But if you are content with a $100 fine, then you may simply find the defendant guilty and leave the punishment to the court” (pp. 310–311). Darrow spoke to the jury briefly: “We do not see how you could” return a verdict of not guilty, he said, adding, “We do not ask it” (p. 311).

The jury came back at 11:23 a.m. (p. 312). The heading “Jury Out Nine Minutes” above that line is the publisher's, so the length of the deliberation is the report's summary, not the stenographer's record.

Asked for the verdict, the foreman said: “We have found for the state, found the defendant guilty” (p. 313). Asked whether the jury had fixed the fine, he answered, “Leave it to the court” (p. 313).

Judge John T. Raulston in a United Newspictures photograph printed in a newspaper in 1925, before the trial opened, under a caption calling him the judge “who will preside in Scopes case” that summer.

The judge then said, “The court now fixes your fine at $100” (p. 313). Scopes spoke next: “Your honor, I feel that I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute” (p. 313). The fine was $100 and costs, and bond was set at $500, which the Baltimore Evening Sun offered to give (p. 313). According to the report's publisher, Bryan's prepared closing speech was never delivered because both sides agreed to skip arguments to the jury; he died on July 26, five days after the verdict (Exhibit A, p. 321; Exhibit F).

What happened to the $100 fine on appeal?

The flaw was spoken aloud in court before the verdict came in. After the charge, Stewart asked the judge about the fine: “I had it in mind that it would be the duty of the jury to fix whatever fine was imposed” (Exhibit A, p. 312). The judge answered that the jury could fix the minimum, but “The practice, however, is for the court to impose the minimum” (p. 312). The jury left the fine to the court, and the judge set it.

Who set the fine: the steps of July 21, 1925, with pages of the stenographic report (Exhibit A), and the appeal of January 1927 as a Reuters report gave it (Exhibit B). The appeal court's own opinion was not read for this page.

In January 1927 the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled on the appeal. According to the Reuters report in the Hong Kong Telegraph of January 17, 1927, the court held, with one judge dissenting, that the act under which Scopes was convicted was constitutional. It also held, by that report, that the verdict should be quashed, because a fine over $50 had to be set by a jury and not by a judge (Exhibit B). The same report says the defense planned to carry the case to the United States Supreme Court; no later step was read for this page.

If the report is right, the conviction was set aside on the one point Stewart had raised at the bar, and the act itself stood. The court finding of July 21, 1925, is on the Docket card as the record states it, and the 1927 outcome is in its Status line, marked as reported.