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Show trial
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The term show trial is a pejorative description of a type of highly public trial. The term was first recorded in the 1930s. There is a strong connotation that the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant and that the actual trial has as its only goal to present the accusation and the verdict to the public as an impressive example and as a warning. Show trials tend to be retributive rather than correctional justice.
Such trials can exhibit scant regard for the niceties of jurisprudence and even for the letter of the law.
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Encyclopedia
The term show trial is a pejorative description of a type of highly public trial. The term was first recorded in the 1930s. There is a strong connotation that the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant and that the actual trial has as its only goal to present the accusation and the verdict to the public as an impressive example and as a warning. Show trials tend to be retributive rather than correctional justice.
Such trials can exhibit scant regard for the niceties of jurisprudence and even for the letter of the law. Defendants have little real opportunity to justify themselves: they have often signed statements under duress and/or suffered torture prior to appearing in the court-room.
Moscow Trials
Show trials were a significant part of Joseph Stalin's regime. The Moscow Trials of the Great Purge period in the Soviet Union are characteristic.
The authorities staged the actual trials meticulously. If defendants refused to "cooperate", i.e., to admit guilt for their alleged and mostly fabricated crimes, they did not go on public trial, but suffered execution nonetheless. This happened, for example during the prosecution of the so-called "Labour Peasant Party" (???????? ???????????? ??????), a party invented by NKVD, which, in particular, assigned the notable economist Alexander Chayanov to it.
The first solid public evidence of what really happened during the Moscow Trials came to the West through the Dewey Commission. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, more information became available. This discredited Walter Duranty, who claimed that these trials were actually fair.
Nuremberg Trials
British jurist F.J.P. Veale implied, in his book "Advance to Barbarism" that the 1946 Nuremberg Trials of Nazi leaders amounted to a form of show trial, as the judgments were not rendered by a disinterested party, which is a key element of independent judicial integrity. Others have disputed this characterization, noting that the forms of due process were observed, the trials were open to the public, and that some of the Nuremberg defendants were acquitted or were convicted of lesser charges than sought by the prosecution.
In 1949 Leo Szilard, the Physicist who drafted the letter Einstein signed to Franklin Roosevelt suggesting the USA start developing the military uses of atomic energy, wrote a short story entitled My trial as a war criminal. In his story the USA surrenders to the Soviet Union, and Szilard stands trial as a war criminal, in an international tribunal modeled after the Nuremberg tribunals, as do President Harry Truman, and Secretary of War Henry Stimson.
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