Though Murder Has No Tongue by James Jessen Badal

defendant—certainly a new role for the sheriff of Cuyahoga County.
    S ATURDAY , J ULY 15
    And so it was. “To deny this man the right to counsel is to abrogate all civil liberties and the bill of rights which is the law in every state of this union,” Day thundered, with all the weight of his high office behind him. According to the
Plain Dealer,
the judge decreed that his colleague Myron Penty had seriously erred in presiding over an arraignment in which the accused stood before the law without legal counsel. Then, turning his outrage on the sheriff, Day declared O’Donnell had “adopted a procedure [of ] which this court does not approve.” As a county official, O’Donnell stood before Day represented by Acting County Prosecutor John J. Mahon. Apparently, the sheriff endured this dressing-down in grim-faced, stony silence and left the courthouse without making any comments to the press. Penty accepted his colleague’s censure andscheduled a second arraignment for Frank Dolezal at 9:30 on the following Friday, July 21. David Hertz exploded: “A hearing as late as next Friday would make a laughing stock of this procedure.” After a rancorous legal skirmish—during which Penty unsuccessfully asked to be removed from the case—the re-arraignment was moved up to Monday morning, July 17.
    M ONDAY , J ULY 17
    Detective Harry S. Brown, one of the more important witnesses and apparently the only member of the sheriff’s team called to testify, was nowhere to be found. Reportedly, he was fishing near Sandusky. There is no proof that anything conspiratorial should be read into his failure to appear, but it remains ironic that Brown’s absence necessitated rescheduling the arraignment to Wednesday—two days earlier than the original date Penty had specified, but also two days later than the date David Hertz had forced on him in Judge Day’s court.
    W EDNESDAY , J ULY 19
    Detective Brown was still numbered among the missing, but Frank Dolezal’s second arraignment proceeded without him. By all accounts, events moved smoothly in Judge Penty’s court. The parade of witnesses, including Coroner Gerber and members of the police department, passed in review without incident. As he had done in the past, Gerber cast some doubt on Dolezal’s guilt in the murder of Flo Polillo by testifying that only an individual who commanded extensive knowledge of human anatomy could have performed such a skillful dismemberment. For David Hertz—now dubbed “chief of defense counsel” by the
Plain Dealer
—it was a day of both frustration and satisfaction. On the one hand, that no one from Sheriff O’Donnell’s office offered testimony prevented him from probing such contentious issues as his client’s multiple confessions and the allegation that he had been beaten; but, on the other hand, Penty dropped the first degree murder charge down to manslaughter, insisting, according to the
Plain Dealer,
that “the testimony failed to show Mrs. Polillo’s slaying was purposeful or premeditated.” Frank Dolezal was duly bound over to the Grand Jury, and bond was set at fifteen thousand dollars, an astronomical sum by the financial standards of the late 1930s. Hertz later tried to get the amount lowered to five thousand dollars, so he could take his client to a psychiatrist, but Common Pleas judge Hurd blocked the move, declaring, “A bond of fifteen thousand dollars for a manaccused of cutting up a woman is low.” Hertz had obviously undergone a major personal odyssey of conscience in the week since he stood outside the county jail. On that Tuesday evening, he had described himself simply as a representative of the ACLU, concerned only with the question of Frank Dolezal’s rights under the law; now he was actively participating in his defense with attorney Fred Soukup before Judge Penty.
    The prosecutor’s office was faced with what