MLB | Acquitted at Night, Banned in the Morning (Black Sox trial, Chicago)

The jury came back on the evening of 2 August 1921 and acquitted every defendant on the first ballot. What happened next is the part worth knowing. Jurors hoisted the players onto their shoulders and carried them round the courtroom. A photographer took a group portrait of defendants, defence lawyers and jurors together on the courthouse steps, which the Chicago Tribune printed the following morning. Then the acquitted men and the people who had acquitted them went off to an Italian restaurant nearby and sang together into the small hours. The next day Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball's first commissioner, banned all eight players for life. Regardless of the verdict of juries, he said, and then set out a standard covering not only throwing a game but sitting in a room where one was discussed and failing to report it. The trial had run about six weeks in the Cook County Criminal Court Building at 54 West Hubbard Street. At issue was a conspiracy to defraud the public over the 1919 World Series, which the heavily favoured White Sox had lost to Cincinnati. The prosecution's strongest evidence, signed statements by Eddie Cicotte and Joe Jackson, had gone missing from the state's attorney's files before the trial began. Historians have argued the acquittals were partly jury nullification. Two of the eight are argued about a century later. Buck Weaver, by every account, took no money. He attended meetings where the fix was discussed and did not tell his club, and Landis's standard caught him precisely. Joe Jackson batted .375 across the series, the best average on either team, collected twelve hits and made no errors. Neither fact settles anything, and both are usually deployed as though they did. The line everyone knows, a boy on the courthouse steps begging Jackson to say it isn't so, is almost certainly invented. Jackson denied it flatly for the rest of his life. The building still stands and is worth looking at. Otto H. Matz designed it in 1893 in Richardsonian Romanesque, and it also held the Leopold and Loeb trial in 1924 and the murder cases that became the play Chicago. Reporters working the corridors here wrote The Front Page. The courts left in 1929, and after decades of other uses the building was converted to offices in the 1980s under the name Courthouse Place. It went on the National Register in 1984 and became a Chicago Landmark in 1993. Coordinates are 54 West Hubbard Street, from OpenStreetMap, cross-checked against the building's National Register coordinate. Cover: the accused White Sox players at the 1921 trial. Photographer unknown, 1921, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the former Cook County Criminal Court Building, now Courthouse Place, photographed by Teemu008, 2012, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.