Sarah Maria Cornell - The Trial

The Trial

The trial began in Newport, Rhode Island on May 6, 1833, and was heard by the Supreme Judicial Council. The lawyers for the prosecution were Rhode Island Attorney General Albert C. Greene and former attorney general Dutee Jerauld Pearce. The six lawyers for the defense, hired by the Methodist Church, were led by former United States Senator and New Hampshire Attorney General Jeremiah Mason.

The trial lasted 27 days. Under Rhode Island law at the time, defendants in capital cases were not permitted to offer testimony in their own defense, so Avery did not get the opportunity to speak. However, both the prosecution and the defense called a large number of witnesses to testify, 68 for the prosecution, and 128 for the defense.

Although the defense maintained that Avery had not been present when the murder occurred, the larger part of the defense strategy was to call into question Sarah Cornell's morals. The defense characterized her as "utterly abandoned, unprincipled, profligate," and brought forth many witnesses to testify to her promiscuity, suicidal ideation and mental instability. Much was made of how Cornell had been cast out of the Methodist Church for fornication.

The prosecution largely attempted to portray the Methodist clergy as a dangerous, almost secret society, willing to defend their minister and the good name of their church at any cost.

A medical debate centered around whether the unborn child was in fact conceived in August, although Puritan standards of propriety regarding the female body sometimes made it difficult to elicit factual information. One female witness, when questioned as to the state of Cornell's body, absolutely refused to answer, saying, "I never heard such questions asked of nobody."

On June 2, 1833, after deliberating for 16 hours, the jury found Ephraim Kingsbury Avery "not guilty". The minister was set free and returned to his position in the Methodist Church, but the public opinion was that Avery had been wrongfully acquitted. Rallies hanged or burned effigies of Avery, and he himself was once almost lynched in Boston. A great deal of anger was also directed at the Methodist Church. To ease tensions, the church's New England Conference convened a trial of its own, chaired by Wilbur Fisk, in which Avery was again acquitted. This did little, if anything, to quell public antipathy toward Avery or the church.

Avery later embarked on a speaking tour to vindicate himself in the eyes of the public, but his efforts were largely unsuccessful. In 1836, Avery left the Methodist ministry, and took his family first to Connecticut, then upstate New York. They ultimately settled in Ohio, where he lived out the rest of his days as a farmer. Avery also wrote a pamphlet called The correct, full and impartial report of the trial of Rev. Ephraim K. Avery. He died on October 23, 1869, and was buried in South Pittsfield Cemetery, Lorain County, Ohio.