Mottled Jury

A Chinese certified public accountant educated at the University of Illinois

A German potato chip maker

An American bank clerk educated at Princeton

A Hawaiian manager of a chain store

An American pump expert

A Chinese clerk to a contractor

An American steamship clerk

A Portuguese clerk

An American clerk

A Danish assistant manager in a railroad's land department

An American civil engineer

A Chinese clerk with a grammar school education . . .

From her seat in the small stuffy courtroom of Honolulu's Judiciary Building, a once handsome, now haggard New York & Washington society, matron eyed these twelve U. S. citizens as last week they took permanent seats in the jury box. They were the twelve men good & true who would try her, Mrs. Granville Roland Fortescue, for second-degree murder. On the same charge they would also try her son-in-law, Lieut. Thomas Hedges Massie, U. S. Navy, who sat beside her staring at the floor and biting his lips. Likewise they would try Seamen Edward J. Lord and Albert Orrin Jones of the Navy who lolled nearby at ease, unconcerned.

From another sector of the courtroom the jury was scrutinized by a swart, heavy Hawaiian who wore spectacles and chewed gum. A trolley motorman. he was Joseph Kahahawai. It was his son and namesake whom Mrs. Fortescue, Lieut. Massie and the two sailors were accused of kidnapping last January from the steps of the same courthouse, shooting to death in the Fortescue cottage and then carrying out toward Koko Head, where they were arrested. Father Kahahawai was there to watch U. S. justice done. Near the defendants sat the other figure most involved in the Territory's most sensational criminal case--Mrs. Thalia Fortescue Massie, the big-blue-eyed, 20-year-old wife of the naval lieutenant. She it was who last September had been roughly seized and ruthlessly raped by a band of five brown-skinned bucks near the Ala Moana Road. At their trial Mrs. Massie had identified Joseph Kahahawai Jr. as the one who broke her jaw with his fist before assaulting her. A "hung jury" in that case fired a chain of racial excitement and turmoil not ending with the start of the murder trial last week. For the past three months the murder defendants had been held by the Navy at its Pearl Harbor base. Twice their joint trial was postponed to allow Clarence Darrow time to arrive from Chicago to head their defense. Circuit Judge Albert Moses Cristy had been automatically disqualified from trying the case because he had compelled the Grand Jury to indict for second-degree murder. His place on the bench was taken by Judge Charles S. Davis, stern young Harvard man.

The four tedious days spent in selecting a jury resolved themselves into a tussle of West against East, of Lawyer Darrow against Prosecutor John Kelley. Mr. Darrow, whose 75 years and frail health cut the daily court sessions short, weeded Hawaiians, Japanese and Chinese out of the jury as often as he could with peremptory challenges. Other Orientals disqualified themselves when they exclaimed that the four defendants "ought to be shot." Broad, Irish-looking Prosecutor Kelley, though essentially fair in his tactics, dismissed ten whites from service. The final mottled jury, composed of three Chinese, a Hawaiian, a Portuguese, a German, a Dane and five Anglo-Saxons, was viewed as a triumph for Lawyer Darrow and the defense because its white element was preponderantly higher than the average population of Hawaii.

What manner of defense Mr. Darrow would set up for Mrs. Fortescue and her co-defendants remained a speculative secret last week. Undoubtedly he was relying on the probability that the prosecution had no eye-witness to the Kahahawai killing, would thus have to content itself with a circumstantial case. That he would attempt to justify the murder as a matter of Anglo-Saxon honor by bringing the rape of Mrs. Massie into the testimony, bobbed up during the jury-picking. Judge Davis, however, was inclined to rule that Kahahawai's guilt in that assault had not been established in court and was therefore irrelevant. One report was that the forthcoming evidence would show that a bungled attempt to castrate Kahahawai resulted in panic and murder. Another possibility was that Lawyer Darrow would claim that something occurred at the Fortescue cottage which produced in the defendants a state of temporary emotional insanity. Recalled was his success with an insanity plea in the Loeb-Leopold case when Drs. Edward Huntington Williams and James Orbison, California alienists, mysteriously arrived in Honolulu last week at the summons of defense counsel.

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