Is the story about lawyer Kony's shortest speech true?

For many years, a story has been circulating on the Internet about how a famous lawyer cleverly achieved the acquittal of a boy who stabbed his classmate. We have verified the authenticity of this story.

As the story tells, one day there was a trial of a high school student who stabbed his classmate, who for several years daily called him a hunchback. During the trial, Anatoly Koni allegedly gave the shortest and perhaps most effective speech of his lawyer career. He began: “Hello, dear jurors!” “Hello, Anatoly Fedorovich!” - the jury responded. Suddenly Kony repeated: “Hello, dear jurors!” - and they answered with bewilderment. This was repeated until the jury, the judges, and everyone present exploded with rage, demanding that “this madman” be removed from the courtroom. “And this is only 37 times,” the lawyer finished his speech, after which his client was acquitted.

You can read about this case both in the media (“Top secret", "Constantinople"), and in social networks - on Facebook (there are publications from 899 And 231 reposts) and VKontakte (1535 And 200). IN Instagram Singer Vlad Topalov shared his story.

Lawyer Anatoly Koni, along with Fyodor Plevako, is often mentioned as one of the two most famous pre-revolutionary lawyers in Russia. One of the main reasons for this is the numerous collections of entertaining legal cases with his participation. In fact, Koni was a prosecutor, judge, senator, writer (in 1902 he even moved forward for the Nobel Prize for the biography of the doctor Fyodor Gaaz), but not a lawyer in the modern sense of the word, that is, a defender. At his most famous trial (case about the assassination attempt by Vera Zasulich on the St. Petersburg mayor Trepov) Koni acted as the chairman of the city district court.

"Verified" was not found in collected works A.F. Koni, one of whose eight volumes is entirely devoted to court speeches, information about the acquittal of a certain boy with a hump. They are not found in other authoritative publications about lawyers.

One might assume that the described case is an old, unverifiable tale about Anatoly Koni. However, an analysis of publications shows that until recently it was not published in popular non-specialized literature. On Facebook, the story is being shared with 2012 year, in "LiveJournal"—since 2009. In the latter case, a link is provided to publication cultural historian Ilya Kalinin in the magazine “Neprikosvennyi zapas” in 2008, and this is the earliest example encountered by “Verified”.

This story also has a “twin sister” with other persons involved. Popular on the Internet story about how the lawyer Fyodor Plevako, already mentioned above, defended a man who killed his wife. In the same way as in the story about Koni, Plevako allegedly drove the jury and the rest of the public into a frenzy, and then declared: “Well, gentlemen, you couldn’t stand even 15 minutes of my experiment. What was it like for this unfortunate man to listen to 15 years of unfair reproaches and the irritated nagging of his grumpy woman over every insignificant trifle?!” After this, his client was acquitted. This story is also circulating on blogs with the title “The shortest speech of lawyer Plevako.”

The story about Plevako is much older than the story about Koni. In its modern form it published and at the beginning of the 2000s, and during the USSR was given with slightly different details. Thus, in the children's story by Nisson Zeleransky and Boris Larin “Mishka, Seryoga and me”, published in 1961, the defendant was hunchbacked and allegedly heard reminders of this from his wife for years. This case was described in a similar way in other publications of that era. At the same time, “Verified” did not find any mention of him in authoritative publications about Fyodor Plevako (collections of speeches, biographies). There is also no evidence that the story about Plevako was actually published before the 1917 revolution. It is also difficult to imagine that a person who has committed premeditated murder will be released solely because of the offensive behavior of his victim. In all likelihood, this story arose as one of the court anecdotes and has nothing to do with reality. As can be seen from the chronology, it was from him that a much later tale about Anatoly Koni and the hunchbacked schoolboy was born. Sometimes, however, even in this variation appears the same Plevako.

Cover photo: Wikimedia Commons

Not true

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