Final Verdict by Adela Rogers St. Johns (1962) Hardcover

Final Verdict
The daughter of Earl Rogers, the great trial lawyer, tells the poignant story of his controversial life
by Adela Rogers St, Johns
Publisher: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Copyright:  1962
Book Club Edition

The daughter of Earl Rogers, the celebrated trial lawyer, tells the story of his poignant personal life and controversial career. Earl Rogers was the greatest criminal lawyer of his day, and in California, in the lusty, brawling days just before World War I, there was much demand for his services. Get Rogers to defend you was the bst advice an accused criminal could have.

Mrs. St. Johns literally grew up in her father's law office among the clerks, cops, bodyguards, acquitted murderers, politicians, and other eccentric types who peopled his life. Most of Rogers' cases were violent and bizarre, and, in Final Verdict, his daughter recreates the high drama she witnessed as they were tried. Rogers was involved in the Chinese Tong Wars, the San Francisco muckraking bribery cases, and the dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times by early labor interests. When Clarence Darrow was accused of bribing a jury, Rogers' defense saved Darrow's reputation, enabling him to go on to his triumphs in the Loeb-Leopold case and the Scopes trial.

The flamboyant Rogers was a celebrity recognized everywhere he went, as movie stars are today. Extravagant, always in debt, he lived high, dressed elegantly. He was beset through most of his life by an unhappy marriage, and so he made his social life away from home. Anything he did was headline news, and his office was one of the regular "beats" that reporters covered, along with Police Headquarters and City Hall. An authentic legal genius, he invented the art of cross-examination as it is now practiced, and made many innovations in courtroom procedure.

Counterpoint to the rising star of Earl Rogers' career as defender of the innocent-until-proven-guilty, runs the story of the dark partner in his makeup, the alcoholic urge. His daughter's running duel with this demon culminated in her signature on a court order to have him put away for his own good, but, in a brilliant cross-examination of her, he won his freedom. He rejected all attempts to rehabilitate him and died soon afterward, at fifty.

Rarely has a father-daughter relationship been explored with more frankness and feeling. Mrs. St. Johns writes with reportorial objectivity and a fiction writer's instinct for searching out motivation and character. Final Verdict is Americana of a high order, for it gives the reader a remarkably vivid picture of Los Angeles and San Francisco in he early twentieth century; but it is primarily the story of a great man, in all his splendor and fallibility, told by the innocent bystander who loved him best.

Condition: Used. Good condition. Hardcover. Dust cover. Dust cover edges shows wear, tear and creases.  Dust cover flaps and pages may be tanning from age. Previous owner's name and date are written on the front endpaper. There's a sleeve pasted to the front endpaper with an index card. It was a way for the previous owner to keep track of her books.

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