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The First Person

The lawyers had been talking for more than nine hours. The case was United States ex rel. Standing Bear v. Crook. The courtroom sat on the third floor of the federal building at Fifteenth and Dodge in Omaha, and the date was May 2, 1879. The crowd had stayed past the dinner recess and into the dark. When the last argument ended, Judge Elmer Scipio Dundy made an announcement. One more speaker, he said, had asked to be heard, and he believed it was the first time in the country’s history such a request had come from an Indian. Standing Bear rose from among the prisoners. He wore an eagle feather in his braided hair, a blue shirt trimmed in red, deerskin moccasins, a Thomas Jefferson peace medal, and a necklace of bear claws. He walked to the front of the room, faced the audience, and held out his right hand. The hand stayed there, still, for a long time. Then he began to speak in Ponca, in a low voice, and the interpreter gave the room his words in English.

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The Price List Nobody Could Open

The most famous memo in American industrial history says a company counted the dead. In the fall of 1977, Mother Jones published “Pinto Madness,” and the country learned the shape of the story it would keep: a car with a dangerous fuel tank, a fix that cost eleven dollars a vehicle, and a memo that priced the burn deaths against the repair and found the deaths cheaper. The memo became the Pinto’s death warrant in the public mind, the smoking gun with a signature, the proof that a corporation had done the arithmetic of murder and filed it.

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Twelve, Neither More Nor Less

The jury box in a Florida criminal courtroom holds six chairs. In one of those courtrooms, in West Palm Beach, six people heard the state’s case against a chiropractor named Hamed Kian, and they convicted him on every count. Kian is forty-five years old, with an office up the road in Jupiter. Florida had suspended his license after three women he had treated complained that he kissed or touched them inappropriately, and prosecutors said he went right on seeing patients. The charge was practicing chiropractic medicine with a suspended license, a third-degree felony, five counts of it. He drew a year and a day in prison and five years of probation. The Fourth District Court of Appeal affirmed in October 2025 and did not write an opinion, because none of this is unusual in Florida. Florida seats twelve jurors only in capital cases. Everything else, from this chiropractor’s case to armed robbery, has gone to six jurors since 1877.

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Raise Your Right Hand: The Blind Oath

First, swear. Then we will tell you what you are accused of. Sit with that order of operations for a moment, because the order is the whole instrument. A man is summoned before the court. He is not told the charge, because there might be no charge to tell. The summons brings him in, the book is offered, and the oath is administered before any indictment is read: swear to answer truthfully every question this court intends to put to you. After that, if anything is coming, it comes inside the interrogatories he has just sworn to answer. He has pledged his answers before the questions exist.

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