Robinson vs. Almond

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The Robinson vs. Mandell , better known as Howland Will Case or Howland Will Forgery Trial , was from 1866 to 1868 before the United States District Court for Massachusetts negotiated and the US became one of the most spectacular and öffentlichkeitswirksamsten litigation legal history of his time.

Subject and course

Negotiations were held on the estate of Sylvia Ann Howland, valued at $ 2,145,029. Her only blood related heiress, Henrietta Howland Robinson, called "Hetty" , challenged her aunt's will and presented a second, allegedly later will, which awarded her not just half but the entirety of the inheritance minus $ 100,000. To prove the authenticity of this Second Testament, Robinson's lawyers summoned a number of prominent experts to court, including naturalist Louis Agassiz , doctor and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Quincy Adams II , grandson of the 6th President of the United States. The other side presented a number of serious witnesses in order to expose the Second Testament as a forgery, such as a number of bank directors, the photographer Albert Southworth and, above all, the mathematicians Benjamin Peirce and Charles Sanders Peirce .

Hetty Robinson was accused of copying the signature on the second will - the signature was identical in all lines and angles to a second document that the defense had before them. The Peirces calculated that the probability of two completely identical signatures from the same hand is around 1: 2.666 × 10 21 . The process is of particular interest for the history of science and law because it was the first time that statistical methods were incorporated into the evidence.

After two years the trial was dropped due to a procedural error.

literature

  • Anon .: The Howland Will Case. In: American Law Review 4, 1870. pp. 625-7.
  • Paul Meier, Sandy Zabell: Benjamin Peirce and the Howland Will. In: Journal of the American Statistical Association 75: 371, September 1980.
  • Louis Menand : The Metaphysical Club. A Story of Ideas in America. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York 2001, ISBN 0-374-52849-7 .
  • Charles Slack: Hetty: The Genius And Madness Of America's First Female Tycoon. New York: Ecco, 2004.