penalty.
The assembled prosecution team was formidable. It included
two high-ranking officials in the Justice Department, as well as a
young, newly appointed U.S. attorney, Roy St. Lewis, and a local
attorney named John Leahy, who was married to an Osage woman
and who had been hired by the Tribal Council to assist in the
various trials.
Hale was aided by his own array of lawyers—some of the “ablest
legal talent of Oklahoma,” as one newspaper put it. Among them
was Sargent Prentiss Freeling, a former Oklahoma attorney
general and a staunch advocate of states’ rights. He had often
traveled around the region giving a lecture titled “The Trial of
Jesus Christ from a Lawyer’s Standpoint,” warning, “When a
small-natured man indulges to the extent of his ability in villainy
and goes as far as his contemptible nature will permit, he then
employs some disreputable lawyer to assist him.” To defend John
Ramsey, Roan’s alleged shooter, Hale hired an attorney named
Jim Springer, who was known as a fixer. Under Springer’s counsel,
Ramsey quickly recanted his confession, insisting, “I never killed
anyone.” Ernest Burkhart told White that Hale had earlier assured
Ramsey “not to worry, that he—Hale—was on the inside and had
everything fixed from the road-overseer to the Governor.”