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Defense will have the word of a onetime visitor in the Lamson house that she herself was dangerously injured in the head by falling in the tub and against the washstand in the same bathroom. Plenty of medical opinion will be offered to refute inquisitive Dr. Arnold. Most valuable of all to the defense, however, will be the benefit of a recent reversal of public opinion against Defendant Lamson. Following Trial No. 1, some Stanford faculty members, some California professional people and Authors Peter B. Kyne and Charles & Kathleen Norris organized a Lamson Defense Committee. In the words of its treasurer, the University of California's famed Professor of Criminology August Vollmer, the Committee has been busy broadcasting its firm belief that the Lamson case is "the most amazing situation that has ever arisen in American jurisprudence — a man condemned to hang for something that has never happened — and every bit of circumstantial evidence pointing to his innocence."
Last September, the respectable Manhattan house of Charles Scribner's Sons published Defendant Lamson's We Who Are About to Die, a sensitive report on prison life from the death house at San Quentin, which boomed into the best-selling class last week. In addition to the helpfulness of responsible advocates, a circumstance which may help Defendant Lamson beat the charge against him this time is the fact that the Palo Alto "WIFE MURDER" now excites California's Press considerably less than it did three years ago. One result: whereas Hearst's San Francisco Examiner followed Lamson into the death house in 1933 to point out that he "spent his first Sunday . . . alone and without religion," Hearst magazine supplements last week were carrying installments of We Who Are About to Die.