It has been a long-understood rule of law that a husband or a wife cannot be compelled to testify against their spouse. This is to preserve the harmony of the marriage or, in cases of conflict in the relationship, to prevent a partner from exacting revenge. 

However, few know that the reverse side of that rule applied in the past. A husband or a wife could not testify on behalf of a spouse even if that testimony would vindicate their partner from the crime they were charged with. Why might this have been so?

Simply because the Courts believed that a spouse, desiring to protect their partner, would be more than willing to commit perjury to save them from punishment. As such, testimony from a wife, for example, as to her husband’s whereabouts at the time the crime was committed, would not be accepted by the Court. Even if that very testimony would clear the defendant of the charges, it would have been seen as suspect and therefore denied being entered as evidence by the Court. Just such a situation existed in the story of A Shadow of Doubt.

Ironically, in just a few years following the Changewater murder trials, the Supreme Court reversed its position, allowing spousal testimony to be considered in weighing guilt or innocence.  This remains the case today. But in the murders of the Parke family in 1872 Changewater, NJ, the search for justice may well have been subverted by the very laws created to protect the innocent.