Henry Marshall Furman
| Henry Marshall Furman | |
|---|---|
From Machinist's Monthly Journal, 1914
|
|
| Born |
June 20, 1850 Society Hill, South Carolina |
| Died | April 10, 1916 |
| Occupation | Judge |
Henry Marshall Furman was the first Presiding Judge of the Oklahoma Criminal Court of Appeals, now the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, and served as Presiding Judge from 1909 to 1916. He died after a lengthy illness, from Bright's Disease, on April 10, 1916.
Born June 20, 1850, in Society Hill, South Carolina, he was the son of Dr. and Mrs. Richard Furman. Dr. Furman was a prominent Baptist minister and founder of Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. Furman was educated in Greenville and Sumter, South Carolina, and worked on farms until age 21, when he set out to join his older brothers in Texas.
Henry Furman took the boat from Charleston to New Orleans in 1871, and there studied law for a year in the office of a relative, Judge J. L. Whittaker. He made it to Texas the following year, finding work teaching school. He was later admitted to the bar at Brenham. In 1876, he was elected county attorney of Bell County. He resigned the office the following year and opened a law practice at Fort Worth. There he met and married Frances Hutcheson in 1879. The couple had two children, Henry, Jr. and Florence. Furman and his family moved to Denver, Colorado in 1890, and from there back to Fort Worth. Throughout his legal career, he tried criminal cases and prosecuted successful appeals on behalf of convicted defendants in the state and federal courts of Texas, Colorado, and the Oklahoma and Indian Territories.
By his early 40's, Furman had matured into a formidable criminal lawyer. In 1891 he served as defense counsel in the infamous Denver trial of Harvard-educated physician and lawyer Thomas Thatcher Graves. Graves was accused of poisoning his elderly benefactor, the heiress Ms. Josephine A. Barnaby, with a solution of arsenic sent as a gift of whisky in the mail. The alleged motive for the murder was Mrs. Barnaby's dissatisfaction with the doctor's services as attorney and adviser. Prosecutors argued that Mrs. Barnaby was, at the time of her death, intent on removing the doctor from the terms of her will, from which he stood to receive a $25,000 bequest.
Dr. Graves admitted at trial that he had sent a bottle of whiskey to Mrs. Barnaby just before her death. Whether it was in fact the death bottle, and whether it was poisoned by Graves or others, were the issues at trial. Furman's client was convicted and sentenced to hang, but won a reversal on appeal. Dr. Graves committed suicide before his second trial in 1893, but protested his innocence. The case made Furman legitimately famous, as it was widely followed in the national newspapers of the day, and warranted an extensive 1921 article in American State Trials, almost thirty years after the verdict.
...
Wikipedia