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The term show trial is a pejorative description of a type of highly public trial in which there is a strong connotation that the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant. The actual trial has as its only goal to present the accusation and the verdict to the public as an impressive example and as a warning. Show trials tend to be retributive rather than correctional justice. The term was first recorded in the 1930s.[1]

China

Tiananmen Square

After the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, show trials were held.[2]

Gu Kailai

Gu Kailai, the wife of purged Chinese leader Bo Xilai, received a show trial in 2012.[3]

Japan

Russia

Moscow Trials

Main article: Moscow Trials

Show trials were a significant part of Joseph Stalin's regime. The Moscow Trials of the Great Purge period (1937-38) in the Soviet Union are characteristic.

The authorities staged the actual trials meticulously. If defendants refused to "cooperate", i.e., to admit guilt for their alleged and mostly fabricated crimes, they did not go on public trial, but suffered execution nonetheless. This happened, for example during the prosecution of the so-called "Labour Peasant Party" (Трудовая Крестьянская Партия), a party invented by the NKVD, which, in particular, assigned the notable economist Alexander Chayanov to it.

Some solid public evidence of what really happened during the Moscow Trials came to the West through the Dewey Commission. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, more information became available. This discredited Walter Duranty, who claimed that these trials were actually fair.

Eastern Europe

Eastern Bloc party show trials

Main article: Eastern Bloc politics

Following some dissent within ruling communist parties throughout the Eastern Bloc, especially after the 1948 Tito-Stalin split,[4][5] several party purges occurred, with several hundred thousand members purged in several countries.[6][4] In addition to rank-and-file member purges, prominent communists were purged, with some subjected to public show trials.[6] These were more likely to be instigated, and sometimes orchestrated, by the Kremlin or even Stalin himself, as he had done in the earlier Moscow Trials.[7]

Such high ranking party show trials included those of Koçi Xoxe in Albania and Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria, who were purged and arrested.[5] After Kostov was executed, Bulgarian leaders sent Stalin a telegram thanking him for the help.[7] In Romania, Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu, Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca were arrested, with Pătrăşcanu being executed.[6] Stalin's NKVD emissary coordinated with Hungarian General Secretary Mátyás Rákosi and his ÁVH head the way the show trial of Hungarian Foreign Minister László Rajk should go, and he was later executed.[7] The Rajk trials led Moscow to warn Czechoslovakia's parties that enemy agents had penetrated high into party ranks, and when a puzzled Rudolf Slánský and Klement Gottwald inquired what they could do, Stalin's NKVD agents arrived to help prepare subsequent trials. The Czechoslovakian party subsequently arrested Slánský himself, Vladimír Clementis, Ladislav Novomeský and Gustáv Husák (Clementis was later executed).[6] Slánský and eleven others were convicted together of being "Trotskyist-zionist-titoist-bourgeois-nationalist traitors" in one series of show trials, after which they were executed and their ashes were mixed with material being used to fill roads on the outskirts of Prague.[6] By the time of the Slánský trials, the Kremlin had been arguing that Israel, like Yugoslavia, had bitten the Soviet hand that had fed it, and thus the trials took an overtly anti-Semitic tone, with eleven of the fourteen defendants tried with Slánský being Jewish.[8]

The Soviets generally directed show trial methods throughout the Eastern Bloc, including a procedure in which confessions and evidence from leading witnesses could be extracted by any means, including threatening to torture the witnesses’ wives and children.[9] The higher ranking the party member, generally the more harsh the torture that was inflicted upon him.[9] For the show trial of Hungarian Interior Minister János Kádár, who one year earlier had attempted to force a confession of Rajk in his show trial, regarding "Vladimir" the questioner of Kádár:[9]

Vladimir had but one argument: blows. They had begun to beat Kádár. They had smeared his body with mercury to prevent his pores from breathing. He had been writhing on the floor when a newcomer had arrived. The newcomer was Vladimir’s father, Mihály Farkas. Kádár was raised from the ground. Vladimir stepped close. Two henchmen pried Kádár’s teeth apart, and the colonel, negligently, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, urinated into his mouth.

The evidence was often not just non-existent but absurd, with Hungarian George Paloczi-Horváth’s party interrogators delightedly exclaiming "We knew all the time—we have it here in writing—that you met professor Szentgyörgyi not in Istanbul, but in Constantinople."[8] In another case, the Hungarian ÁVH secret police also condemned another party member as a Nazi accomplice with a document that had actually been previously displayed in glass cabinet of the Institute of the Working Class Movement as an example of a Gestapo forgery.[8] The trials themselves were "shows", with each participant having to learn a script and conduct repeated rehearsals before the performance.[8] In the Slánský trial, when the judge skipped one of the scripted questions, the better-rehearsed Slánský answered the one which should have been asked.[8]

Romania

Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu were condemned to death in a Stalinist-style trial.[10] At one point, their forcefully-assigned lawyers abandoned their clients' defense and joined with the prosecutor, accusing them of capital crimes instead of defending them.[11] No offer of proof was made for the Ceaușescus' alleged crimes. They were tried based on references, solely by offense-name, to criminal acts they had committed in the opinion of prosecutors, or as alleged in press reports. Various irregularities presented themselves, or became apparent post-trial:[11][10]

  • An accusation of genocide was never proved.
  • The Ceaușescus were accused of having US $1 billion in foreign bank accounts. No such accounts have been found.[11][10]
  • Romanian law prohibited carrying out the death sentence less than ten days after a verdict.[13] After the Ceaușescus' execution, the death penalty was abolished in Romania.[14]
  • The coup leaders said the execution of the Ceaușescus was necessary to stop terrorists from attacking the new political order. However, no terrorists or terrorist cells were found to have been active in Romania.[15]
  • Initially, Iliescu did not wish to carry out the executions, but General Victor Stănculescu conditioned the support of the Romanian Army on the couple's being shot.[13] After few hours of debating this option, Iliescu agreed with Stănculescu.[13]

Before the execution, Nicolae Ceaușescu declared, "We could have been shot without having this masquerade!"[10]

Western Europe

Cadaver Trial

Cadaver Trial was a posthumous trial over Catholic Pope Formosus held in 897.

Dreyfus Affair

The Dreyfus affair was a show trial in France in 1894, where a Jewish captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was accused of spying for Germany.

North America

Salem witch trials

In the late 17th century, various people in Salem, Massachusetts were accused of practicing witchcraft and consorting with the Devil in the Salem witch trials. 59 people were sentenced to hang, Nineteen people were executed, one was killed by crushing, and five died in prison.

Sacco and Vanzetti

The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927 was one in which two anarchist Italian immigrants were accused of an armed robbery in Massachusetts. Both were executed, despite international appeals.

South America

2011, in Ecuador, president Rafael Correa sued newspaper El Universo and several staffers for libel in a trial that made international headlines due to the manipulation of justice and extraordinary damage award.http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caso_El_Universo

Australia


See also

Notes

  1. ^ OED
  2. ^ Show Trials in China: After Tiananmen Square, Mark Findlay, Journal of Law and Society, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 352-359. Published by Wiley-Blackwell
  3. ^ China’s Show Trial of the Century, Ma Jian, Project Syndicate, 2012-08-20
  4. ^ a b Bideleux & Jeffries 2007, p. 477
  5. ^ a b Crampton 1997, p. 261
  6. ^ a b c d e Crampton 1997, p. 262
  7. ^ a b c Crampton 1997, p. 263
  8. ^ a b c d e Crampton 1997, p. 265
  9. ^ a b c Crampton 1997, p. 264
  10. ^ a b c d e f Nicolae și Elena Ceaușescu: „Împreună am luptat, să murim împreună!“
  11. ^ a b c d e f s:ro:Stenograma procesului Ceaușescu, translated at Transcript of the closed "trial" of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu.
  12. ^ Ionuţ Ţene Cine a ordonat execuţia lui Nicolae Ceauşescu? Napocanews.ro
  13. ^ a b c BBC Days That Shook the World Season 3, Episode 8, "The Road To Revolution: The Execution of Ceauşescu/The Iranian Revolution"
  14. ^ Stanislaw Frankowski, "Post-Communist Europe", in Hodgkinson, Peter and Rutherford, Andrew. Capital Punishment: Global Issues and Prospects. Waterside Press (1996), ISBN 1-872870-32-5. p. 224.
  15. ^ R.M. Dan Voinea: Nu au existat teroristi in decembrie '89. Sotii Ceausescu au fost ucisi pentru a salva administratia comunista, care dureaza si azi Hotnews.ro

References

  • Bideleux, Robert; Jeffries, Ian (2007), A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change, Routledge, ISBN 0-415-36626-7
  • Crampton, R. J. (1997), Eastern Europe in the twentieth century and after, Routledge, ISBN 0-415-16422-2
  • Showtrials Website of the European Union
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