Conclusion

Abstract

While falling far short of what counts as fair and just today, the Haymarket defendants were accorded the rights and protections generally recognized by courts in the Gilded Age. Many details of the court proceedings that today would prompt an immediate reversal on appeal—the use of evidence seized without warrant and of undocumented provenance, the inflammatory display of anarchist flags and placards, the seating of jurors who openly voiced their dislike of anarchists—were common practice in that era. Other questionable practices, such as extensively using speeches and publications as evidence, viewing coconspirators as equal to principals, granting accomplices who turn state’s witnesses lighter sentences, and condemning men to execution, remain features of the judicial order in the twenty-first century.