Chuck Berry Was Convicted Twice on the Same Charge. A Judge's Words Erased the First.

Описание: On December 23, 1959, Chuck Berry was indicted under the Mann Act (18 U.S.C. 2421) for transporting a fourteen-year-old girl from El Paso, Texas, to St. Louis, Missouri; his defense was that he had hired her to work as a hat-check girl at his club. After a two-week trial in March 1960 he was sentenced to five years and a $5,000 fine. On appeal his lawyers argued, among other grounds, that the trial judge's conduct and remarks were hostile and prejudicial, and, by Wikipedia's account, racist. On October 28, 1960 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit (Berry v. United States, 283 F.2d 465) found the evidence ample but vacated the judgment, holding that the attitude of the trial judge toward Berry, as shown by his remarks, made the trial unfair. The court did not set the remarks out in its opinion, and it called Berry's treatment of the girl "inexcusable". At a retrial in 1961, before a different judge and jury, he was convicted again and sentenced to three years and $5,000; the Eighth Circuit affirmed (295 F.2d 192, October 27, 1961) and the Supreme Court declined review on January 8, 1962. He was in federal prison from February 1962 to October 1963. The girl, the government's chief witness, is not named or shown in this video; everything the record holds about her is her answers to other people's questions.

Charles Edward Anderson Berry was born in St. Louis on October 18, 1926. In 1944 he and two friends drove west in a 1937 Oldsmobile; after robberies in Kansas City he was sentenced to ten years and released from the Algoa reformatory on his 21st birthday in 1947. In 1955, on Muddy Waters's advice, he went to Leonard Chess and recorded Maybellene, a number-one R&B hit whose writing credit was shared with two other men, one of them Alan Freed, until Berry won it back. In 1977 a committee chaired by Carl Sagan put Johnny B. Goode on the Voyager Golden Record, the only rock and roll song on the disc. In 1979 he pleaded guilty to evading nearly $110,000 in federal income tax on his 1973 earnings and served 120 days; by EBSCO's account the plea came within days of a performance for President Carter at the White House, and by Euronews's account he served his sentence at Lompoc. In 1989 and 1990 civil suits alleged that women had been videotaped in the restroom of his Wentzville restaurant, the Southern Air; Berry said the camera was meant to catch a worker stealing, nothing was proven in court, and the claims were settled. After a June 1990 raid at Berry Park the St. Charles County prosecutor said officers seized hashish, marijuana, weapons and more than $122,000 in cash; by Rolling Stone's account he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor marijuana possession, and the record relied on here shows no conviction on the child-abuse counts filed that July. These are charges and allegations, not findings, unless a court is cited. He died on March 18, 2017, aged 90.

Sources: Berry v. United States, 283 F.2d 465 (8th Cir. 1960) and 295 F.2d 192 (8th Cir. 1961), via OpenJurist; NASA; Wikipedia (Chuck Berry; Voyager Golden Record; Southern Air Restaurant); EBSCO Research Starters; the AFI Catalog; Jefferson City News Tribune; Euronews; Deseret News (AP), August 4, 1990; Best Classic Bands. Film footage: Cosmos (PBS, 1980), NASA's Voyager launch film (1977), Voyager 2 Neptune briefing (1989), Beat-Club (Radio Bremen, 1972), CBS News (1972), a Dick Clark rock 'n' roll special (1974), The Tonight Show (NBC, 1987 and 1989), AM Cleveland (1987), British television (1988), Rock & Roll (PBS / BBC, 1995), Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction (1986), Living St. Louis (Nine PBS), Great Day St. Louis (KMOV), FOX 2 St. Louis (2008); performance clips play silent. This is a documentary. Every photograph is a real archival, press or publicity photograph and every clip is real film footage; there are no AI-generated images.

Image credits (via Wikimedia Commons): "Sumner High School 2" by Paul Sableman, CC BY 2.0; "Taylor Hackford, Hollywood Walk of Fame, Jan 2013" by Angela George, CC BY-SA 3.0.