Aiken

[Laurie Verge]

To the best of my knowledge, no one had done any research on Frederick Aiken until Christine Christensen did her stupendous work. Therefore, I don't know that any author could make a fair judgment of Aiken's skills except for acknowledging that he and the other lawyers were up against insurmountable odds.

IMO, Aiken certainly had the verbal skills to express himself well and did so - albeit with florid Victorian prose that we find boring today. The major drawback was that the military commission and the public already had made up their minds as to guilt; it just came down to degrees of guilt.