The Project Gutenberg EBook of Courts and Criminals, by Arthur Train

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Title: Courts and Criminals

Author: Arthur Train

Release Date: March, 2004 [EBook #5268]
Posting Date: March 26, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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COURTS AND CRIMINALS

By Arthur Train

These essays, which were written between the years 1905-1910 are
reprinted without revision, although in a few minor instances the laws
may have been changed.

CHAPTER I. The Pleasant Fiction of the Presumption of Innocence

There was a great to-do some years ago in the city of New York over an
ill-omened young person, Duffy by name, who, falling into the bad
graces of the police, was most incontinently dragged to headquarters
and "mugged" without so much as "By your leave, sir," on the part of the
authorities. Having been photographed and measured (in most humiliating
fashion) he was turned loose with a gratuitous warning to behave himself
in the future and see to it that he did nothing which might gain him
even more invidious treatment.

Now, although many thousands of equally harmless persons had been
similarly treated, this particular outrage was made the occasion of a
vehement protest to the mayor of the city by a certain member of the
judiciary, who pointed out that such things in a civilized community
were shocking beyond measure, and called upon the mayor to remove the
commissioner of police and all his staff of deputy commissioners for
openly violating the law which they were sworn to uphold. But, the
commissioner of police, who had sometimes enforced the penal statutes in
a way to make him unpopular with machine politicians, saw nothing wrong
in what he had done, and, what was more, said so most outspokenly.
The judge said, "You did," and the commissioner said, "I didn't."
Specifically, the judge was complaining of what had been done to
Duffy, but more generally he was charging the police with despotism and
oppression and with systematically disregarding the sacred liberties of
the citizens which it was their duty to protect.

Accordingly