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Joseph Bonnell Mann (1843-1924) assisted
Levy Mayer in defending Iroquois Theatre manager
Will J. Davis
in the final trial. Mann's primary contribution was
to question prospective jurors.
From newspaper reports, his unofficial role at the
trial was that
of jester. A newspaper description: "With legs crossed,
revealing congress boots, whiskers working up and
down in an effort to dispose of the large twist
which he put into his mouth at intervals, never
failing to hit the juror's
spittoon at a distance of ten feet."
And in a follow-up story, "Attorney Mann
wandered around the courtroom in a restless mood
all day. During the last hours of the afternoon,
he sat on a cracker box near the open window
munching twist and practicing at expectoration,
using a chicken in the yard as a target."
And when
Judge Kimbrough expressed reluctance to
hold jurors overnight Mann remarked,"Probably
living better than they ever did before."
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A New Jersey native, he followed in his father's
footsteps and became a lawyer. Mann graduated from
Michigan University law school in 1866.
Probably. One biography from the early 1900s
said he graduated from Kent Law School but by the
time Kent graduated its first students, 1886, Mann
had been practicing for a decade.
Mann passed the bar in 1866
and was elected city
attorney of Danville, Illinois the following year. He refused a
second term. Over the next fifty years, Mann formed and
dissolved partnerships with a half dozen Danville and
Chicago attorneys, including his eventual father in
law, Oliver Davis. Joseph and Lucy Davis Mann had three
children. Her father was friends with Abraham
Lincoln. Mann was also on the circuit court, a
one-term
Danville alderman, an Illinois delegate to the 1884
Democratic convention and a popular after-dinner
speaker.
For all his pacing and spitting, Joseph Mann
considered his participation in the
Iroquois Theater trial a career highlight. He
must have spun a good yarn in later years about his
involvement in the Iroquois Theater trial, one that
altogether omitted the role of the Levy Meyer - who
by all accounts of the trial was the mastermind
behind Davis's acquittal and went on to earn a place
in defense attorney history. At Mann's death
in 1924 his
hometown newspaper published an obituary that at
least relative to the Iroquois, and probably also to
other claims therein, was as accurate as a Donald
Trump story.
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