MONKEY BUSINESS : What really happened in Tennessee - the so-called 'Monkey Trial,' that took place in Dayton, Tennessee, was a 'set-up' trial, initiated by the American Civil Liberties Union to test the Tennessee law that prohibited the teaching of evolution

Commonweal, Oct 8, 1999 by Julia Vitullo-Martin

The law under which Scopes was prosecuted stood for another forty-two years. Tennessee textbooks were edited to exclude evolution. Worse, according to a study in Science magazine in 1974, publishers across the nation also expunged Darwin from textbooks, not wanting legal problems to interfere with sales.

The nation and its school children would have been better off had Darrow mounted a full defense and given the jury serious material to consider, enabling them to reflect and rule on the rightness of this particular prosecution under Tennessee law. With such a defense, the jury might have refused to convict, nullifying the law. Or, had the jury still convicted, a full defense might have given the ACLU a legitimate record on which to appeal, perhaps successfully. It would have been ironic, however, had science won its preeminent legal position based on a text most scientists would repudiate today.

Julia Vitullo-Martin is the director of the Citizens Jury Project at the Vera Institute of Justice.