100 years ago in Spokane: The courtroom tension in the Maurice Codd trial reached a new peak after the judge accused attorneys of ‘disgraceful’ behavior

Judge WD Askren reached the boiling point with attorneys on both sides of the Maurice Codd subornation of perjury trial.

“If you men insist on turning this case into a boxing match or a vaudeville show, you will have to get someone else to act as referee and judge,” he said, after sending the jury out of the room. “I will not put up with it.”

He said their arguments were “disgraceful to the bar association of this county and to the courts of this state … they are also disgraceful to the defendants at the bar.”

He mostly blamed defense attorney Fred Robertson, whose insinuating words had provoked the prosecutor to make improper remarks. The defense attorney had implied that one witness, a police detective, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and had accused another witness of lying.

From the obituary beat: Sarah Ridpath, 72, widow of the late Col. WM Ridpath, a Spokane pioneer, died at St. Luke’s Hospital after an illness of three weeks.

From the KKK beat: The Ku Klux Klan announced that it would propose a Washington law making a public school education compulsory.

Such a law was widely seen as an attack on Catholic schools, and was modeled on a KKK-backed measure that had just been passed in Oregon.