I think Robert Ferguson is right in suggesting that “trials operate as contests that become rituals” and that “the ideal trial moves from contest toward ritual in communal acceptance of the result achieved in court.” Non-ideal trials suffer a deficit in one direction or the other. That is, “contest yields to ritual through acceptance of the decorum in procedural fairness, but if a community is genuinely and deeply divided over a trial, the rhythms of contest prevent the more subtle and less absorbing elements of consensus from working themselves out.”

Ferguson mentions the “all ritual” trial that Truman Capote recounts in “In Cold Blood.” Rather than just rehash Capote’s take, which in some respects is not as “non-fictional” as Capote would have us believe, let’s couple it with the recollections and first-hand observations of one of the (what could have been key) performers in that trial. The general contours of what happened were never in dispute. Two theretofore petty criminals, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, murdered a prosperous farmer, Herb Clutter, and his resident family near Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959. The murder loomed large in my own childhood—I having grown up a handful of counties to the northwest of Holcomb—and resonated more widely after the publication of Capote’s self-styled “nonfiction novel” in 1966 and a related 1967 film starring Robert Blake. The Clutter murders, as Conrad Knickerbocker put it in a contemporary review of the novel, “echoed through the lives of all who lived nearby, rushing toward some appalling, mysterious point of psychic infinity.”

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