1821-1894
John Graham, born in New York City in 1821, was the son of lawyer and clergyman David Graham. He entered Columbia College at 11 years of age and graduated as valedictorian of his class before he turned 15. He studied law under his father until the latter’s death in 1839, and completed his studies under his brother, David Graham, Jr., a prominent attorney and legal scholar who served on the 1847 legislative commission that drafted the Field Code. At the age of 18, Graham began practicing in the police courts which did not require a law license at the time. He was admitted to the bar in 1842.[1]
Graham was involved in many famous criminal and divorce cases in the Antebellum and Gilded Age eras.[2] Early in his career he assisted his brother, David Graham, Jr., in defending Polly Bodine, the “Witch of Staten Island,” one of the first women ever put on trial for capital murder. On Christmas night 1843, neighbors responding to a house fire in rural Staten Island found the bludgeoned, charred remains of Bodine’s sister-in-law and infant niece. Suspicion immediately fell on Bodine as a “fallen woman” separated from her husband, eight months pregnant by a different man and known to have had multiple abortions. Bodine’s three trials received unprecedented coverage from the emerging “penny press.” Young reporter Edgar Allan Poe predicted: ”This woman may, possibly, escape; for they manage these matters wretchedly in New York.”[3]
Bodine’s first trial ended in a hung jury. The trial “gripped New York, [with] every word recounted in special editions of the new penny press newspapers . . . With its spicy brew of sex, greed and gore, the Bodine case was tailor-made for their brand of sensationalism and outrage — presumption of innocence be damned.”[4] The second trial, which was moved to Manhattan, attracted large crowds of curious spectators, many of them spurred on by P. T. Barnum’s notorious wax figure of Bodine as a menacing, toothless witch. Bodine’s conviction was overturned on appeal. The appellate court held that she was denied a fair trial on numerous grounds, including the press’s extensive publication of scandalous rumors about her character.[5] Bodine’s third trial was moved to upstate Newburgh where she was finally acquitted.[6]
In 1859, Graham participated in the sensational trial of Congressman Daniel Sickles who was charged with the murder of Philip Barton Key, the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia and son of the author of the “Star Spangled Banner.” Sickles shot Key in broad daylight in Lafayette Square near the White House when he discovered that Key, who had been having an affair with his wife, was outside his home attempting to contact her. Sickles was acquitted after a month-long trial based on the legal defense of temporary insanity, possibly the first time such a defense had ever been mounted in a United States court. The jury acquitted Sickles after only an hour of deliberation. Graham was a key member of the defense team, which included Edwin Stanton, future Secretary of War under President Lincoln.[7]
Graham’s opening statement for the defense focused on putting the victim on trial. He argued that Key was a known philanderer of the first order who had seduced the congressman’s young wife while painting Congressman Sickles as a sympathetic and wholesome husband and father who only desired justice for his family. The defense drove home the idea that blind rage and jealousy had driven the congressman briefly mad when he shot Key. The strategy proved effective.[8]
Graham was also a key member of Boss Tweed’s criminal defense team and was among the attorneys held in contempt and fined by Justice Noah Davis for their attempt to pressure Davis into disqualifying himself on the eve of Tweed’s second trial.
Graham’s only foray into politics came in 1850 when he ran for the office of New York County District Attorney but was defeated by N. Bowditch Blunt. Graham once appeared before the Court of Appeals as “state counsel” for the prosecution in a capital murder case.[9] He later regretted his actions and said, “I have defended many a man for nothing to clear my conscience of the burden of sending Rogers to the gallows.”[10]
Graham was an eloquent speaker known for his “theatrical pleas to jurors’ emotions,”[11] “but his great strength lay in the logic of his defences and his boldness.”[12] He “was painfully methodical in preparing his cases, looked after the smallest detail and permitted no subdivision of labor which would admit of his overlooking a point in the interest of a client. When he had a case on hand, all the affidavits were drawn by himself.”[13]
In his youth, Graham was a robust athlete and enthusiastic member of his local volunteer fire company. A lifelong bachelor, Graham was extraordinarily close to his mother and never fully recovered from the shock of her death when her dress caught on fire. Her “tragic death affected him to the extent of keeping him out of society,”[14] and he refused to join any bar associations or social clubs. Graham was described as an odd dresser who preferred a “Byron collar suited [to] his thick neck, and “squared toe shoes.”[15] “In later life, Graham had a cynical disregard for his personal appearance, and was conspicuous by an unbecoming rufous, ringleted wig.”[16]
He died in New York City on April 9, 1894.
[1] History of the Bench and Bar of New York Vol. 1, New York History Co., 1897, at 337.
[2] Id.
[3] “City Lore: ‘The Witch of Staten Island,’” New York Times, Oct. 29, 2000.
[4] Id.
[5] People v. Bodine, 1 Edmonds Select Cases 36 (1845).
[6] New York Times, Oct. 29, 2000; see also Alex Hortis, The Witch of New York, Pegasus Books, 2024.
[7] Colleen Shogan, “Murder and Untimely Tragedy: The Haunting of Lafayette Square,” The White House Historical Association, available at www.whitehousehistory.org.
[8] Heather Thomas, “Murder in Lafayette Square,” Headlines and Heroes, Library of Congress Blogs, Sept. 14, 2022, available at https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2022/09/murder-in-lafayette-square/
[9] People v. Rogers, 18 NY 9 (1858) (establishing the principle that voluntary intoxication is not a defense to murder but may be admissible to negate specific intent).
[10] History of the Bench and Bar at 337.
[11] Thomas, supra.
[12] Id.
[13] “Lawyer John Graham Dead,” New York Times, Apr. 10, 1894.
[14] Id.
[15] Id.
[16] Id.