In 1770 the most hated men in Boston were eight British soldiers who had fired into a crowd. The best lawyer in town agreed to defend them.
He was thirty-five, with a young family and a reputation to lose, and every reason to say no. He said yes, because he believed that a man is not punished by a mob, he is tried, and a trial means nothing if the defendant everyone hates cannot get a real one.
His strategy was not theater. It was facts. He walked the jury through where each soldier stood, what the crowd was doing, what a reasonable man fears when he is surrounded and pelted in the dark. And in his closing he gave the courtroom a line that outlived him by two centuries: facts are stubborn things, and whatever our wishes or our passions may be, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
The result, in the angriest room in the colonies, was six of the soldiers acquitted and two convicted of manslaughter rather than murder. The facts held when almost nothing else would have.
The popular case and the right case are not always the same case, and the lawyer's job is the second one. Adams later called his defense of those soldiers one of the best pieces of service he ever rendered his country. Do the work the facts require, especially when the room wants something else.
On the Boston Massacre trials of 1770 and Adams's closing argument, see the Massachusetts Historical Society.
