Injustice of the Justice System Circa 1948

Compiled by John 'Birdman' Bryant

 From My Six Convicts. a Psychologist's Three Years in Fort Leavenworth Prison
, by Donald Powell Wilson
(Rinehart and Co, 1948): Selected parts of pp. 187-194

If [an] offense appears on the books of both states, the disproportionate sentences of the two states are sometimes staggering. Two men in different states are guilty of arson. The prisoner in Alabama is in for one year, the prisoner in North Carolina for forty years. Perjury carries four years in Connecticut, twenty years in New York, life in Maine, death in Missouri, five hundred dollars and forty lashes in Delaware. West Virginia punishes bigamy sixteen times as severely as incest. Wyoming and Colorado punish incest ten times more severely than bigamy.

Another practice that feeds the convict's belief that crime is not absolute, but relative, is the fine system. "$5,000 or three years, $300 or ninety days."

Although debtor's prisons were theoretically abandoned a century ago, one man out of two (57%) in prisons, jails and penitentiaries is serving a sentence because of debt -- he can't pay a fine. Many of the remaining 43% would gladly have paid a fine, but they had the bad luck to be sentenced by a judge who did not levy fines. A judge may or may not levy fines, may or may not impose a sentence, or both a sentence and a fine, at his own discretion.

It would be difficult to persuade a prisoner that a fine represents punishment in the sense that imprisonment does. Why, he would ask, does every man who can, pay? And why, when a fine is imposed, does the money go into public coffers instead of into some form of restitution for the offense committed? One man pays a fine and goes home to his family. Another goes to prison, his and his family's life ruined..... England and Scotland have solved the problem of fines by the simple expedient of installment payment. Imprisonment for non-payment of fines in England exceeded 80,000 in 1913, but dropped to 11,000 in 1933, the latter representing largely unemployed paupers. It seems odd that America, with its mania for installment buying, has not applied this concept to its courts. Nearly a fourth of American imprisonments for inability to pay fines are for amounts less than ten dollars, and sixty percent for less than twenty dollars. This is certainly punishment for poverty.

The fact that laws change in point of time, and have become too cumbersome to be prosecuted, may simply be the toll of civilization and the caprice of the written law. But the matter of fines-versus-sentence is considerably more sinister in its implications. Is a man to pay for his crimes or his poverty? For his crimes, or for getting caught? These two questions gain momentum in the light of prosecution and conviction records. The famous reports of the Wickersham and Seabury commissions and of the Committee of Fifteen published early in the thirties were avidly read by the literate prisoners then, and probably still are. These reports indicated that in large cities at that time a man had an 85% chance of escaping arrest, a 98% chance of escaping conviction, and a 99% chance of escaping punishment. Of 257 gang murders in Chicago in the regime of Mayor Bill Thompson and Al Capone, not a single conviction resulted. Even in smaller cities with the best conviction records of that decade, only 10% of crimes resulted in conviction. Current percentages are not much improved.....

The 1949 Report covering 1948 shows spectacular increases in police "activity" in 1,654 American cities: there were over 14 1/2 million arrests, of which 12 million were for parking, traffic and highway violations, and another million and a half for drunkenness, disorderly conduct and prostitution. However, for this large number there were only three-fourths of a million "fingerprint" arrests: those in which the police wanted to check on suspicious characters, or get vagrants, drunks and prostitutes on record, or where the offense seemed serious enough to warrant further data from the FBI fingerprint records.

The most confusing presentation of percentages appears in the Reports under offenses "Cleared By Arrest." The tables and pictograms claim that from 22% to 90% of "serious" crimes are cleared in this way. The text, however, explains that "the term `cleared by arrest' ordinarily means that one or more offenders have been arrested and made available for prosecution." This does not mean that the suspects are guilty, or that there is an actual trial. They are only held and charged. In American cities, to assemble suspects for eventual "cleared by arrest" charges means inefficient trial-and-error arrests. While criminologists decry this sorry practice, my six men, by turns, scoffed and chortled at the police indiscriminately "running in" suspects. Investigations indicate that about half of all arrests are false and result in discharge. Some cities have reached a peak of ninety percent of arrested suspects being released without charge. Both my men and criminologists labeled this practice as kidnapping. In fact, in the only table of releases listed in the Reports of 1949, based on the population of certain cities totalling 33 million, over one million arrested persons were released. This is quite in contrast to the efficiency of the Postal Department inspectors, who gather evidence first and then unerringly arrest the offender.

The Uniform Crime Reports state that 58% of annual fingerprint arrests are of recidivists. But what does not appear is the kind of recidivist that lies back of such figures. The Los Angeles Times for February 20, 1950 ran a feature on the world's largest arraignment court in that city, highlighting the "regular customers," some of whom have been arrested over 250 times and many of whom return to court every few days, depending on the length of their sentence. They are drunks, prostitutes, aments, vagrants, panhandlers-derelicts who obviously are not responding to jail sentences.

It is the belief of Mr. Hoover, director of the FBI, that the volume of arrests throughout the nation indicates the extent of police activity. The statement cannot be challenged in the light of 14 1/2 million arrests in 1,654 of our cities in 1948. But one may perhaps offer his condolences to the hard-working traffic cop.

Other evils affecting the convict are stool pigeons, false arrests, bail bonds and fixed sentences -- rackets which go hand-in-hand in most large cities in a sorry parade of justice. While there are not many innocent men in the penitentiary, the prisoner's frequent complaint, "I been framed," cannot be too quickly dismissed. Easy preys to false arrest and casual conviction without trial are convicts like Weary Willie and "I.Q.33" whom Scott turned up in his testing. These are sometimes picked up by the police as a convenient way to close a case lingering on the blotter, and the convict finds himself in prison before he knows what has happened. Sanford Bates, the first superintendent of the Bureau of Prisons formed in 1930, himself reports the case of an ignorant mountain boy whose conviction was railroaded by a Federal marshal after getting the boy to "plead guilty to not doing it" on the day the revenuers raided a still. "Ah jes' pleaded guilty to not bein' dar, but heah ah is." One estimate claims that nearly one-third of a prison population is serving time for offenses they did not technically commit. They are in on false charges. Either the offender agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge in exchange for a fixed sentence, or he was actually framed by a police stool pigeon; that is, a stool pigeon in the employ of the police.

The procuring of a fixed sentence is called bargaining. If the district attorney's office knows its case is weak, it assures its conviction records by throwing a scare into the offender, urging him to plead guilty to a lesser offense in return for a lighter fixed sentence and thus avoid coming to trial. This sounds good to the uninitiated. The offense may be one that the offender actually did commit in the past, or it may represent an unsolved case on the police blotter. Sometimes it is one which is concocted on the spot. The offense to which the man pleads guilty may not even be in the same category as his actual crime.

This procedure accomplishes several things. It increases the conviction records of the district attorney and those of the police department. The offender gets off with a lighter pre-agreed sentence, and often the fixing attorney and all concerned are the richer. A notorious case of this kind involved a highjacker who looted a truck of $30,000 worth of silk. The charge was armed robbery, subject to a sentence of ten years to life. The highjacker pleaded guilty to petty larceny, was fined one dollar and given one year in prison. Al Capone, when he was finally apprehended, bargained for an eighteen-month sentence on a rum-running charge and expected never to come to trial. He might never have served the seven of his ten-year sentence, if he had not prematurely and publicly boasted of the fix, thus forcing the judge's hand.

A major stumbling block in the way of a convict's developing a respect for the law is society's approval of the stool pigeon. The use of a stool pigeon in the pay of the police and vice squads in most of our large cities is a common device in effecting false arrests. It is a practice used frequently to apprehend the small-time criminal who otherwise eludes the police. The stool pigeon, in one of his varied capacities, is given marked money or stolen goods to place on the person of a victim, who is then immediately frisked by detectives or police lying in wait. What possible defense can such a victim make? The stool pigeon is not only paid, but protected in the continuation of his own pickpocketing, dope peddling or pimping racket as long as he is valuable to police in his snitches. There after he is sometimes arrested and sentenced himself.. It's a hard life. . . . England uses no stool pigeons....

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Slightly Woozier Thoughts on the Impossibility of Justice

The other day a friend and I were partaking of the mortal remains of quite a number of defenseless grapes, and the subject of law enforce arose. Having spent a number of years as a police reporter, I began thinking of curious and often erroneous ideas that people have of what we regard as a system of justice. Without meaning to bore the reader, I offer the following thoughts and observations.

First, any system will make mistakes. The only way to convict all of the guilty is to convict everybody. The only way to avoid convicting the innocent is not to convict anyone. The more the system leans in one direction, the more it will err in the other.

Second, it is absurd to accept the Enlightenment idea that a criminal, having “paid his debt to society” by a stint in prison, will come out and make a new start as a normal human. The fact is that most crime is committed by career criminals. An armed robber aged twenty-nine invariably will have a rap sheet dating from puberty of thirteen arrests and a couple of convictions for assault, drug offenses, gun offenses, drugs, and so on. He is not going to make a fresh start.

Third, the complacent adage that “it is better to let ten guilty men go free than to convict one innocent man” may apply in cases of shoplifting. It may not be better to let ten Ted Bundys go free than to convict an innocent. Your choice may depend on whether you have a daughter in college.

Fourth, people charged with crimes by urban police departments are almost always guilty. There are two reasons for this. One is that they are usually caught in the act, driving the stolen car, carrying the illegal gun, or having drugs in their possession. The other is that DA’s won’t paper a case unless they are pretty sure of winning either in court or by plea bargain.

Fifth, the US does not have trial by jury but, in over ninety percent of cases, trial by plea bargain. Crime is so rampant in American cities that many times more courts and prosecutors would be needed for jury trials.

Plea bargaining is convenient for prosecutors but a very bad system. It makes it easy for overzealous or crooked prosecutors to take advantage of suspects with little or no legal representation. It can, and sometime does, work against what we regard as normal people.

Suppose you are a suburban white man walking through a shaky part of the city without knowing it to be a red-light district, and you get unfairly arrested for solicitation of a prostitute. Your choice is to plead down to public lewdness or some such with a fine of five hundred dollars, or go to trial, lose your marriage, and maybe get three years. Which?

Yes, this can happen. Ages ago in my police-reporter days I walked one evening on Fourteenth Street, then a hooker venue. One of the girls said, “You sportin,’ honey?” Another lady of the evening stepped closer, as if to listen to my answer. I strongly suspected the first to be Cookie Marino, a police plant in the anti-sex trade force.

Solicitation was then defined as offering a specific price for a specific act. A guy with no interest could easily kid around (“I want five girls. I’ll give you a thousand dollars each.”) and get arrested. Then what?

Sixth, almost all of the celebrated shootings and brutality by police result from disobeying a cop’s orders. If a minion of the law tells you to stop and put your hands up, do it. You can sue later.

Seventh, drug rehab is a scam. The judge doesn’t want to send the addict to prison, since prisons are overflowing, but doesn’t want to let him go, and look soft on crime, so he sentences him to rehab, which he knows doesn’t work, but it becomes somebody else’s problem.

Eighth, jury trials are largely fraudulent. You are supposed to be tried by a jury of your peers. This was a good idea since it made it difficult for the government to railroad people it didn’t like. In today’s climate of racial hatred, “one’s peers” has to mean of one’s own race. A white jury is not unlikely to acquit a white charged with beating a black (Rodney King) and a black jury is very likely to acquit a black charged with killing a white (OJ Simpson).

Further, in theory the jury is supposed to consider the facts dispassionately and come to a reasoned verdict. Good luck with that. A jury of theoretical physicists might approach this ideal. In jury selection both prosecutors and defense attorney will try to impanel jurors emotionally biased in their favor.

For example, in a rape case the prosecutor will want a jury consisting of man-hating feminists and he will coach the victim to look sweet and defenseless. The defense will want a jury of primitive rural Christians who will think that if she was in that bar, in that neighborhood, with THAT Dress up to her armpits, she damned well deserved what she got. Yes, this is exaggerated, but it is how they think.

Ninth, it is not always clear what the country believes to be the purpose of prison.

Is the purpose to punish? Then prison should be harsh. If it isn’t disagreeable, it isn’t punishment.

It the purpose to deter? Then it should ed godawful as otherwise it will not deter.

Should vengeance be an acceptable purpose? In the case of someone selling marijuana, no—but the psychopath who tortured three girls to death? Your answer to this may depend on whether it was your daughter.

Is the purpose to rehabilitate? Then prison should be pleasant, with libraries, online courses, and training in auto mechanics, carpentry, and bricklaying.

Is the purpose to protect the public? Then the answer is long sentences’ whether in pleasant circumstance or not. Since the only thing that more or less reliably decreases criminality is age, sentences might read “until middle age.”

Tenth, the current system virtually guarantees recidivism. A black guy with a fourth-grade education goes to jail for fifteen years at age twenty-five. He comes out at age forty with no money, no acquaintances on the outside, and zero employability. What precisely do we expect him to do? Realistically there is no practical answer to this question. He understands armed robbery and dope sales. These are all he understands.

My only answer to all of this is what a friend, a public defender, told me: “Don’t ever—ever—get into the hands of the criminal justice system.”

Finally, it is worth remembering that few actually care about guilt or innocence. Trial attorneys are combative and want to win. An assistant DA does not rise in rank by losing cases. The defense guy, or gal, gains fame and clients by acquitting clients and do so even if they know the perp is guilty.

The first comment is, perhaps the most illuminating:-
Uncle Al says: • Website February 16, 2021 at 11:41 pm GMT • 1.5 months ago • 200 Words   ↑

Justice is what you deserve. The Gulag is what you get. Sacrifice that the One Party be ever victorious! Amerizuela wants you poor, miserable, enslaved, and dead; and ever-believing within your heart-of-hearts. How do you know you are being governed unless you bleed?

0) All elections at all levels are treason. The One Party – by divine rule.
1) Rule by executive order – puppet Big Bro’ Joe in his showy robes.
2) Corruption of the judiciary, judges and process, at all levels.
3) Show trials and execution of predecessor.
4) Pursuit and purges of former officials.
5) Media as propaganda (Goebbels Goebbes; one of us, one of us!).
6) Crippling the private sector. Most Beloved Leader is mother. Most Beloved Leader is father.
7) Absolute opposition censorship
8) Absolute surveillance of all people at all times.
9) Exploitation of social hatreds.
10) Active military suppression of lawful citizenry.
11) Selective extermination of nuisance populations.

If people are made to believe absurdities, then they are remade to accept atrocities.
Agree: Johnny Walker Read
Replies:
@Wild Bill, @Jett Rucker

 

The Chauvin Trial and the Chelsea Handler Standard of Justice ex Wall Street Journal  [ 19 April 2021 ]
Today’s progressives prefer summary trial convictions based on popular sentiment.

Comedian Chelsea Handler speaks virtually at the 26th Annual Critics Choice Awards, March 7.

While an apprehensive nation awaits the outcome of a Minneapolis police officer’s murder trial, it’s possible that the administration of American justice could soon be characterized by what future historians may come to call the Chelsea Handler standard.

As the trial of Derek Chauvin got underway a month ago, Ms. Handler, who has a day-job as a comedian but has branched out recently into the field of jurisprudence, issued a profound observation on Twitter : “So pathetic that there’s a trial to prove that Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd when there is video of him doing so.”

You might think that more than 800 years after the Magna Carta and 230 years after the Bill of Rights, some notions of due process, presumption of innocence and protection against arbitrary justice might have embedded themselves in the minds of even our densest celebrities.

But while it’s easy to mock, we should be careful not to assume that this taste for summary conviction on the basis of popular sentiment is confined to unfunny comedians. It seems to be widely shared among the ideologues who now control the Democratic Party, the media and cultural elites.

Rep. Maxine Waters of California, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, joined demonstrations this weekend in Minnesota. She told supporters that if the Chauvin trial verdict goes the wrong way, “we’ve got to not only stay in the street but we’ve got to fight for justice.”

You may recall a president got pilloried a while ago for urging his supporters to “fight” for their desired outcome. It was noted then that the term is a well-worn rhetorical phrase that doesn’t necessarily amount to a literal incitement to violence. But there can’t be much doubt about the import of what Ms. Waters said. She made her remarks in Brooklyn Center, a few miles from the barricaded Minneapolis courthouse where the Chauvin trial is taking place and the site of the killing last weekend of a black man by a police officer. The place has been aflame for the past week in an orgy of rioting.

The Handler standard, or the Maxine maxim—the idea that we don’t really need a trial to know whether someone is guilty of a heinous crime—has always had its adherents. There have surely been miscarriages of justice—acquittals of guilty people and convictions of innocent ones—throughout history. The jury system is never perfect.

But what’s frighteningly new about our current climate is that the rejection of apparently unwelcome trial outcomes is now part of the dominant progressive critique of our longstanding political and civic order. If U.S. institutions are the product of white-supremacist exploitation—as is essentially the consensus of the people who run the government, most corporations, and leading cultural institutions—then the judicial system itself is inherently and systemically unjust. If the principle of equality before the law is to be supplanted by the objective of “equity” in outcome, then only outcomes that serve the higher objective of collective racial justice can be considered legitimate.

So trials that produce the “wrong” verdict are not just miscarriages of justice. They are an indictment of the entire system.

The ascendancy of this new progressive radicalism adds a frightening element to the unease the nation feels this week as the jury deliberates in Minneapolis. By all accounts the trial of Mr. Chauvin has been rigorous, methodical and fair. The prosecution seemed to make a strong case that Mr. Floyd died at least in part as a result of the officer’s actions. The defense may have sowed some doubts about whether Mr. Chavin’s intent rose to the level of culpability required of the most serious charges.

But under our new rules, the jury’s verdict will be tolerated only if it goes the “right” way.

This rejection of the legitimacy of the judicial process is rooted in the same neo-Marxist ideology—a race- and identity-based interpretation of structuralism—that holds sway over the minds of much of our ruling class.

To the old Marxists, the capitalists were the exploiters. In “The ABC of Communism,” published in 1920, Bolshevik leaders Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky used language that sounds strikingly familiar today. They denounced the courts as instruments of “bourgeois justice,” which was “carried on under the guidance of laws passed in the interests of the exploiting class,” and recommended instead the establishment of “proletarian courts.”

In one of the more savage ironies of history, some two decades later the authors themselves were tried by such courts under Josef Stalin and sentenced to death.

Yet even Stalin thought some kind of judicial proceeding was necessary. Our modern revolutionaries would dispense even with show trials.