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Week of 22 October 1999 Vol. III, No. 11 Feature Article Rare wanted poster finds Booth guilty as not-yet-charged By Eric McHenry A wanted poster from 1865 refers to John Wilkes Booth as "Booth," "THE MURDERER Of our late beloved President," "the . . . criminal," and "said person." It does not, however, refer to him as John Wilkes Booth. By April 20, six days after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the surname alone was sufficient. Currently up for viewing in the Theodore Roosevelt Room on Mugar Memorial Library's first floor, the poster is remarkable both for its rarity and for what it assumes. There are lengthy physical descriptions of two of Booth's accomplices (though both of their names are misspelled); the description of Booth is comparatively brief. His appearance, it seems, was by then as familiar to the general public as his full name. Most striking are the poster's explicit presumptions of guilt. Neither Booth nor his coconspirators, obviously, had yet been to trial. But U.S. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, the government official whose name appears authorially near the bottom of the poster, had no compunction about calling them "criminals." Nor did he stop there: "Let the stain of innocent blood be removed from the land by the arrest and punishment of the murderers," the poster proclaims. "All good citizens are exhorted to aid public justice on this occasion. Every man should consider his own conscience charged with this solemn duty, and rest neither night nor day until it be accomplished." In order to understand a call for justice so apparently at odds with the tenets of American jurisprudence, BU legal historian Gerald Leonard says, one must consider the context in which it was issued. "The best explanation for what you're seeing there is probably the most obvious one," says Leonard, a LAW associate professor. "The assassination of Lincoln was such a heinous crime, so well-connected with the monumental tragedy that was the Civil War and the unprecedented suffering that attended it. Under such circumstances, the feelings in the North -- feelings about Booth, and about the death of this man who was a tremendous hero -- probably overwhelmed any sense of the proprieties of a wanted poster." In times of domestic crisis, Leonard adds, the Constitution's charge to "provide for the common defense" can begin to obscure the need to "secure the blessings of liberty." During the Civil War, Lincoln himself had suspended the writ of habeas corpus -- the constitutional guarantee that people will not be held without trial. He took thousands of political prisoners, confirming his despotism to Southern sympathizers like Booth, and laying the foundation for further suspension of rights. "In the course of the Civil War," says Leonard, "the kinds of basic civil liberties that we take for granted now, at least rhetorically, and that were taken for granted then as well, were flipped on their heads. In wartime, especially in Civil War time, the same sensitivities aren't going to be there, particularly when you're dealing with people considered not just run-of-the-mill criminals, but traitors of the worst imaginable sort, and when you have fairly specific legal, or illegal, precedent for ignoring basic civil liberties.