Baseball justice was handed out yesterday, Harvard-style, when a mock trial conducted by ESPN in the halls of Harvard Law School concluded that checkered legend Pete Rose should be admitted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Austin Hall’s Ames moot courtroom was converted into a television set as pre-eminent criminal defense lawyers Johnnie Cochran and Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz spent an afternoon and evening addressing a jury of 12, an in-person crowd of around 200 and a nationwide broadcast audience of millions.

Dershowitz made a pointedly rational case that Rose—who holds the all-time record for career hits, singles, at-bats and games played—should remain barred from the Hall as a result of alleged bets placed on the Cincinnati Reds while Rose was that team’s manager. Cochran, by contrast, prevailed after appealing largely to emotions in his defense of the three-time World Series champion’s right to enter the ballot for the Hall of Fame despite an agreement signed in 1990 permanently banning him from taking part in Major League Baseball.

At 11 p.m., the jury delivered an 8-4 verdict declaring that Rose should join the Hall, though all but one of the jurors said they thought Rose had, in fact, gambled on baseball.

Three hours of testimony earlier in the day—with the two lawyers trading questions and ripostes with witnesses including learned baseball fans, former professional players and two experts on compulsive gambling addictions—had given abundant proof that Rose’s was not an open-and-shut case.

“It’s a perfectly difficult question, because there’s not even any debate about whether otherwise he’d be admitted,” Jeffrey R. Toobin ’82 told The Crimson while waiting for the verdict last night. Toobin, who is also a Crimson editor, served as a commentator for the ESPN broadcast.

But many said that his historic baseball achievements—which, several witnesses vouched, would be more than enough to guarantee a place in the Cooperstown, N.Y. Hall—could not distract from the allegation that Rose violated a supreme rule of the game by betting on his own sport and team.

“Baseball is a game of rules,” Dershowitz said during his opening remarks. And perhaps the most important of those rules, he said, was “Thou shalt not bet on baseball—and especially not on a game in which you have a duty.”

The Ivied Dugout

As camera crews made final adjustments and microphones were nudged—and the courtroom’s large clock set forward to read 7 p.m. so that the taped first portion of the broadcast would appear to be live that evening—Dershowitz paced the courtroom floor a few minutes before the trial’s actual 2 p.m. start. Looking lost in intense thought at times and grinning boyishly at others, he set the tone for the afternoon and evening’s events: a very serious scrutiny of a recreational pastime, a prosecution for crimes against fun.

Before long, a gruff bailiff was growling for all to rise, Catherine Crier—who is a legal television personality but returned yesterday to her original career as a judge—was calling the court into session, and the attorneys were launching into spirited opening statements. And their high rhetoric and stylized questioning was soon matched by lively testimony from colorful witnesses who were often as famous as the man being “prosecuted.”

Among the witnesses marshalled by Cochran for the defense was Hank Aaron, the former Atlanta Brave who unseated Babe Ruth as the player with the most career home runs in 1974.

Aaron sidestepped Dershowitz’s evidentiary presentation of a pattern of illicit gambling, instead choosing to focus on Rose’s accomplishments as a player.

“I don’t know what he did off the field,” Aaron said in a previously- exchange. “I’m going by his record, what he stood for for 24 years...He was very dangerous—he was the complete player.”

Former Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee also said Rose’s skill on the baseball diamond outweighed any dishonor he may have incurred by gambling.