Everything about Show Trial totally explained
The term
show trial is a pejorative description of a type of highly
public trial. The term was first recorded in the 1930s. There is a strong connotation that the
judicial authorities have already determined the
guilt of the
defendant and that the actual trial has as its only goal to present the accusation and the verdict to the public as an impressive example and as a warning. Show trials tend to be
retributive rather than
correctional justice.
Such trials can exhibit scant regard for the niceties of
jurisprudence and even for the letter of the law. Defendants have little real opportunity to justify themselves: they've often signed statements under duress and/or suffered
torture prior to appearing in the court-room.
Moscow Trials
Show trials were a significant part of
Joseph Stalin's regime. The
Moscow Trials of the
Great Purge period in the
Soviet Union are characteristic.
The authorities staged the actual trials meticulously. If defendants refused to "cooperate", for example, to admit guilt for their alleged and mostly fabricated crimes, they didn't go on public trial, but suffered execution nonetheless. This happened, for example during the prosecution of the so-called "
Labour Peasant Party" (Трудовая Крестьянская Партия), a party invented by
NKVD, which, in particular, assigned the notable economist
Alexander Chayanov to it.
The first solid public evidence of what really happened during the Moscow Trials came to the West through the
Dewey Commission. After the
collapse of the Soviet Union, more information became available. This discredited
Walter Duranty, who claimed that these trials were actually fair.
Nuremberg Trials
British jurist F.J.P. Veale implied, in his book "Advance to Barbarism" that the 1946
Nuremberg Trials of
Nazi leaders amounted to a form of show trial, as the judgments were not rendered by a disinterested party, which is a key element of independent judicial integrity. Others have disputed this characterization, noting that the forms of due process were observed and that some of the Nuremberg defendants were acquitted or were convicted of lesser charges than desired by the prosecution.
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