As barnyard thefts went, it was a pretty bad one: a fat turkey and fourteen chickens gone, just as the winter of 1828 froze up Washington waterways and holiday feasts beckoned. The culprits behind the heist, as the courts determined, were James Sims and Benjamin Thompson. They might be wayward young men largely lost to history, but their lawyers’ words were not. The defendants’ counselors argued that “they are boys, that the crime for which it is stated that they were guilty of would never have been done had they been in their proper senses.” A pretty juvenile crime by Read more