William F. Howe (lawyer)

William F. Howe (1828 - September 2, 1902) was an American trial lawyer with the New York City firm Howe and Hummel.

William Frederick Howe was born in Southwark, London, England on 20 August 1828, the eldest of three sons of working class parents: Samuel and Mary Ann Howe. City of London records show that his early career was as a legal clerk but that in 1854 he was convicted with others at the Old Bailey for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and served a short prison sentence. He then moved to the USA and resumed his legal career, claiming to have been born in Boston, Massachusetts. He became a naturalised American on 19 September 1863 in New York where he founded Howe and Hummel with Abraham Hummel (1849-January 21, 1926). Howe handled most of the firm's criminal work, participating in more than 600 murder trials in the course of his fifty-year career and winning a large but unstated proportion of them. He was noted for his extravagant dress, favouring bright waistcoats and large jewelled rings - although he steadily dressed down as a capital trial progressed, invariably ending it in a funereal suit and black tie. He had a markedly florid rhetorical style, on one occasion delivering an entire summing-up, two hours long, while on his knees before the jury box. One of his most remarked upon talents was an apparent ability to weep at will, although legal historian Sadakat Kadri notes that his frequent opponent Francis L. Wellman "suspected that he used an onion-scented handkerchief to get in the mood". The less extrovert but more intelligent Hummel specialised in civil law and ran the firm's thriving blackmail racket, representing chorus girls and thwarted lovers, threatening married men with exposure and well-off young bachelors with suits for breach of promise of marriage.

At its peak, operating from offices just across the road from NYPD headquarters on Centre Street, Howe and Hummel received fat retainers from a significant proportion of the criminals, brothel-keepers, and abortionists of New York. All 74 madams rounded up during a purity drive in 1884 named Howe and Hummel as their counsel, and at one time the firm represented 23 out of the 25 prisoners awaiting trial for murder in the city's Tombs prison and had an undeclared interest in the twenty-fourth.

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