In 1925, a Raleigh police captain fired a single shot into a passing Ford he mistook for a bootlegger’s car, killing a prominent attorney inside and launching a six-month hullabaloo that wound its way clear to the governor’s desk.
The case would ignite Raleigh’s legal world and rope in nearly every powerful politician, launching a weeklong trial that saw a pack of attorneys trying to out-grandstand each other, tossing Bible verses to the jury like courtroom popcorn.
But in the end, officer Jesse Wyatt, captain of Raleigh detectives, would serve just seven months in prison for shooting Stephen S. Holt — a sentence handed down almost apologetically, cut short 20 days by a governor’s pardon…