Lawyers Caged

CLAGGETT

Posted By: Ken Wright (email)
Date: 8/9/2009 at 09:04:39

Lyons Mirror, November 5, 1857.

LAWYERS CAGED

Judge Claggett, at the late session of Court held at Fort Madison, passed an order that attorneys should ask permission when they wished to retire from the court room. Thereupon the lawyers, one after another, would rise up, and with long faces and juvenile accents, say “Please sir, may I go out?” His Honor, for this contempt, ordered the whole bunch off to jail. And the Burlington Hawkeye suggests that no public edifice, not excepting the penitentiary, ever contained so much latent rascality as the Fort Madison jail when filled with the lawyers of the district.