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Northshire Manchester: Jeffrey Amestoy – Winters’ Time: A Secret Pledge, a Severed Head, and the Murder That Brought America’s Most Famous Lawyer to Vermont

Amestoy, former Chief Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court, will share this riveting account of one of Vermont’s most lurid murder trials.
This study of the 1927–1928 murder trial and appeal of John Winters is an intriguing look at one of the most celebrated cases in Vermont judicial history—the time Clarence Darrow, America’s greatest advocate, appeared for the defendant before the Vermont Supreme Court. It reveals tensions of class, gender, and family, and gives the reader a glimpse of justice in the 1920s. Winters’ Time combines legal history, true crime, a cast of Vermont characters, and America’s famous “attorney for the damned.”
“It’s a page-turner and a valuable portrait of small-town life inside and outside the courtroom in the 1920s.”— Seven Days
JEFFREY AMESTOY has written about law, politics, and leadership. He has been chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court, attorney general of Vermont, and a fellow at the Center for Public Leadership, Harvard Kennedy School. His essay “The Supreme Court Argument That Saved the Union: Richard Henry Dana Jr. and the Prize Cases” was awarded the Hughes-Gossett Prize by the Board of Editors of the Journal of Supreme Court History.
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