Judge Tate

Judge Tate is the presiding judge at the trial of Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Smith, and the figure charged with formally delivering the jury’s verdicts. His role is defined by a contrast between controlled courtroom authority and the stark finality of the sentences he reads: he quells a courtroom outburst with a look, maintains composure through a contested inquiry into possible prejudice, and reads the death verdicts as the sound of a passing train enters the room.

Judicial Authority in the Trial

Judge Tate’s authority is shown in small, consequential interventions as well as in the formal proceedings. During one exchange, an attorney’s joke provokes laughter in the courtroom. The flare-up ends under Judge Tate’s dour gaze, which restores order without a recorded reprimand or extended interruption. The episode presents his manner as controlled rather than theatrical: the court’s attention returns to business because he makes clear that the levity has gone far enough.

At the trial’s final session, the court hears the attorneys’ summations before the jury returns. Duane West, the county attorney, argues that both defendants are equally guilty regardless of which man fired the shotgun and asks for death as the maximum penalty. Arthur Fleming urges the jury not to destroy the body that houses an eternal soul; Harrison Smith makes the principal defense argument against capital punishment and asks for mercy in the form of life imprisonment. Judge Tate’s level-headed instructions to the jury precede these addresses. The account does not reproduce their substance, but it places his directions between the trial evidence and the competing closing arguments, a formal judicial role distinct from either side’s plea.

Verdict and Sentencing

The jury deliberates for forty minutes. While spectators wait in the courtroom, Judge Tate has to be summoned from his farm, where he has gone to feed his horses. He arrives in a hurriedly donned black robe, but the haste of his return does not carry into his conduct: he asks the jury foreman whether verdicts have been reached with what the narrative describes as impressive sedateness and dignity. The court bailiff brings the sealed verdicts to the bench.

As Judge Tate reads them, train whistles from an approaching Santa Fe express sound through the courtroom. He announces that Richard Eugene Hickock is guilty of first-degree murder on the first count and that the punishment is death. He then reads the seven remaining counts: three additional convictions for Hickock and four for Perry Smith. Each time he reaches the punishment, he gives the words a hollow emphasis that seems to merge with the train’s fading call. The scene makes his office the instrument through which the jury’s decision becomes an official sentence; the defendants stand handcuffed to guards and look back at him without visible reaction.

Judge Tate then dismisses the jurors, acknowledging that they have performed a courageous service. The condemned men are led away. At the door, Perry Smith remarks to Hickock that the jurors were not timid, and both men laugh as a cameraman photographs them. The image appears in a Kansas newspaper under the question, “The Last Laugh?” The moment does not alter the verdict, but it sets the prisoners’ public composure against the gravity of the sentences Judge Tate has just pronounced.

The Challenge to the Trial

The conduct of Judge Tate and the fairness of the proceedings become subjects of a later hearing that lasts six days and is at one point transferred to Lansing. Russell Shultz questions whether the jurors and the community could have been impartial. Eight jurors say they had never known anyone in the slain family; four acknowledge slight acquaintance with Mr. Clutter. Each says he entered the jury box without prejudice. One juror also acknowledges that, although ordinarily averse to capital punishment, the magnitude of the crime might lead him to vote for it. The exchange makes the hearing’s concern concrete: prior familiarity and views on punishment could matter to the defendants’ claim that their trial was fair.

Shultz’s questioning of Judge Tate turns to his own acquaintance with Mr. Clutter and the possibility of moving the trial elsewhere. Judge Tate describes their contact narrowly. Mr. Clutter had once been a litigant in a case over which Tate presided, involving an airplane that fell on Mr. Clutter’s property and damage to fruit trees. Beyond that case, Tate says he had no occasion to associate with him and had seen him perhaps once or twice in a year. This testimony distinguishes a limited, professional contact from personal intimacy, while acknowledging the prior case that Shultz could raise.

Asked about community feeling after the two men were apprehended, Judge Tate says that, in his opinion, residents regarded them as they would anyone charged with a crime: they should be tried according to law, convicted if guilty, and given the same fair treatment as anyone else. He denies that the community was prejudiced against them because they had been accused. When Shultz suggests that the circumstances called for a change of venue, Judge Tate responds that he could not order one on his own initiative under Kansas law; a change required a proper request. His answer is a statement about the court’s legal authority, not simply an assertion that moving the case would have been unnecessary.

The Question of Venue

The hearing also establishes why the defense had not requested a change of venue. Arthur Fleming explains that he believed local opinion might be more lenient on the penalty than opinion elsewhere in the state. His reasoning rests on public expressions against capital punishment by the Methodist minister Reverend Cowan and other ministers, as well as a statement attributed to a brother of Mrs. Clutter that the defendants should not be put to death. The argument does not establish that the community was free of prejudice; it records the defense’s stated reason for remaining in the county and helps explain the procedural question Shultz presses.

Judge Tate’s position in this dispute is therefore twofold. As trial judge, he conducts the proceedings and reads the jury’s findings; later, he must explain both his limited prior association with Mr. Clutter and the legal constraint on changing venue without a proper request. The account presents his assurance of local fairness as his testimony, alongside the jurors’ accounts and the defense’s explanation for its decision. That distinction leaves the reader with the competing grounds on which the trial’s fairness is examined, rather than treating the judge’s confidence as an uncontested conclusion.