A jostling mob of journalists swarmed the courthouse. Photographers snapped away. This murder trial would be "reported to the ends of the civilized globe," one paper said.

The defendant was a millionaire. The motive was jealous rage. The crime was bloody.

This was the Trial of the Century - and it was only 1907.

The defendant was Harry Thaw (O.J. Simpson would not be born for 40 years), and the case set a pattern for "trials of the century" to come.

At least 33 cases have been given that label, according to Gerald Uelman, professor of law at Santa Clara University Law School.

War crimes, civil rights abuses, sensational murder and assassinations. Even the impeachment of a president. All of these have been placed at the doorstep of the law in this century. And not all have resulted in fair verdicts.

The most powerful cases forced society to face fundamental quandaries. In the Scopes "Monkey Trial," it was the place of religion in public life. The Simpson case presented troubling racial questions. Trials like the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and Charles Manson's "Helter Skelter" killings left us peering into the darkness of the soul.

"The measure of a great trial," said defense attorney Leslie Abramson, "should be the impact on society - cases that advanced our state of knowledge and reflected on the problems of the times, those that aided in the search for truth."

Laurie Levenson, associate dean of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, offered another standard.

"A trial of the century is when the public feels invested in the outcome," she said. "They will sit around and talk about it; they'll root for one side or the other."

Here's a look at some of the 20th century's greatest dramas of crime and punishment.

• • •

Red Velvet Swing: Harry Thaw, the wastrel heir to a Pittsburgh industrialist's fortune, fatally shot society architect Stanford White in the middle of the White-designed Madison Square Garden in view of hundreds. Thaw's wife, showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, had told her husband that White, her former lover, once raped her. The first "trial of the century" offered salacious views of the upper crust. There was testimony about White's red velvet swing where he liked to have showgirls swing so he could look underneath their dresses.

After two trials, Thaw was found innocent by reason of insanity and spent the rest of his life in and out of insane asylums.

The trial, held in New York, taught the media lessons they would not forget about the appeal of courtroom dramas featuring wealth, indulgence and sexual decadence. It was the beginning of saturation coverage with the new art of photographic reproduction enlivening newspapers.

• • •

Scopes 'Monkey Trial': If great lawyers make great trials, the "Monkey Trial" of John Thomas Scopes in Dayton, Tenn., in 1925 matched two giants.

For the defense, Clarence Darrow brought a brilliant mind, a fighting spirit and the luster of participation just a year before in another "trial of the century," that of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in the "thrill killing" of a 12-year-old boy in Chicago.

Joining the prosecution was none other than populist ex-presidential candidate and orator William Jennings Bryan.

The Scopes trial, fictionalized in the drama, "Inherit The Wind," involved a young science teacher charged with teaching the theory of evolution in violation of a Tennessee law that permitted only the Bible's version of divine creation. It was a classic battle between fundamentalism and scientific skepticism.

Scopes' guilty verdict and fine of $100 were later overturned.

• • •

The Scottsboro Boys: Racial prejudice was the unspoken topic in the Scottsboro Boys trials, which stretched over six years, 1931-1937, in Alabama.

Nine young black men, the oldest 19 and the youngest 12, were charged with raping two white women aboard a train. The women were revealed to be prostitutes, and two doctors testified they had not been raped.

All defendants were convicted and sentenced to death. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the convictions because blacks were excluded from the jury, a landmark decision. Ultimately, four of the Scottsboro defendants served prison sentences. The last survivor was pardoned at age 64 in 1976 by Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace.

• • •

Lindbergh Kidnapping: The 1935 trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, charged with the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh's infant child, was "the biggest story since the Resurrection," H.L. Mencken wrote.

Lindbergh electrified the world in 1927 by flying solo from New York to Paris. The snatching of his 20-month-old son from his crib was every parent's worst nightmare. A two-year manhunt led authorities to Hauptmann, a German-born carpenter. Investigators found $14,500 in ransom money behind boards in his garage. Unusual scientific analysis of wood linked him to a ladder found below the nursery window. Hauptmann was convicted and electrocuted in 1936.

• • •

Rosenbergs and the Bomb: The nuclear age and Cold War hysteria converged in the 1951 trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a case infected by anti-Semitism. The Rosenbergs, former Communist Party members, were charged with passing secrets of the atom bomb to the Soviet Union.

When they were electrocuted in 1953, New York's Union Square filled with 10,000 protesters and rallies erupted around the world.

Historians debate their guilt today, and their sons still press for their vindication.

• • •

Chicago 7: Seven protesters were tried together for incitement to riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where police and opponents of American military involvement in Vietnam battled in the streets. The courtroom antics of the defendants and the judge, Julius Hoffman, made the trial almost as tumultuous.

Hoffman ordered an eighth defendant, Black Panther Bobby Seale, bound, gagged and tied to his courtroom chair. He was tried separately. The courtroom became a theater of protest as wild-haired defendants wore judicial robes to court, then stripped them off and stomped on them. Five defendants were convicted of inciting to riot, and Seale of contempt. All convictions were overturned.

• • •

Manson Trial: The story of Charles Manson and his band of "hippie" followers strained credulity.

At first, no one knew what was behind the 1969 murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others in the hills near Hollywood, a fearsome spectacle of butchered bodies and bloody scrawlings on mansion walls. "Helter Skelter" was one chillingly mysterious message.

When Manson's gang was rounded up, terror turned to disbelief. A demented cult leader had ordered mass murders on a whim, prosecutors said. The 10-month trial revealed a world of disaffected young runaways - remnants of the '60s culture of flower power, LSD and sexual anarchy - who killed on command. Manson and his three women followers carved the letter "X" in their foreheads. They were sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment when the death penalty was briefly outlawed.

• • •

Pentagon Papers: The case put the Vietnam War on trial.

It began when a top military analyst, Daniel Ellsberg, disillusioned with American policy, decided to release a top-secret, 47-volume Defense Department study of the U.S. role in Indochina over three decades. His action was branded by President Nixon as treason.

The government tried to stop publication of the Pentagon Papers, first in The New York Times and then in The Washington Post, prompting a landmark Supreme Court decision barring prior restraint of free expression.

Ellsberg and his colleague, Anthony Russo, went on trial in 1971 in Los Angeles, where the papers had been copied.

Nixon authorized unlawful efforts to discredit Ellsberg, including a break-in at his psychiatrist's office. Details of the burglary opened another Pandora's box of information on the emerging Watergate scandal, which eventually toppled Nixon. Ultimately, charges against Ellsberg and Russo were dismissed on grounds of outrageous governmental misconduct.

• • •

O.J. Simpson: When Simpson, a football hero and pop culture star, was arrested for the gruesome stabbings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, former Buffalo Grove-resident Ronald Goldman, it was a made-for-TV tragedy from the start.

Simpson had been a familiar face on screen for years. When he fled in a white Bronco, TV cameras followed. His one-year trial was televised gavel to gavel. Viewers were transfixed by legal procedure and such esoterica as DNA. The subtexts of racial prejudice and domestic violence were dissected by a new breed of TV personalities - legal commentators.

When the trial ended in acquittal many who disagreed chose to blame the cameras. A later civil trial, untelevised, resulted in Simpson being held liable for the killings. Simpson has consistently claimed innocence.

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