The New York Tombs Inside and Out! / Scenes and Reminiscences Coming Down to the Present. A Story Stranger Than Fiction, with an Historic Account of America's Most Famous Prison.

by John Josiah Munro

Board of Criminal Experts

Under a paid Board of Criminal Experts, sitting daily from 10 a. m. till 5 p. m., and who are there to investigate, sift and go to the bottom of things generally, the rich and the poor would have a better chance of receiving justice meted out to them.

A very common opinion, which is gaining ground every day, and which is in some respects true, is that big criminals go unpunished, while others who are lawfully convicted of crime command such influence with the courts or high political powers that they are able to obtain their freedom by parole or pardon or get off with a very light sentence.

Others, after being lawfully convicted, are able to cheat the prison, provided they have money to fight their case in the higher courts and thus obtain a new trial which in the end means an acquittal. All this tends to bring contempt on our courts and occasionally invites the people to take the law into their own hands. We have too many indictments to-day and too few convictions. Millions of dollars of the people’s money are often wasted on cases where there is no chance of conviction. The courts are cumbered with hundreds of cases of men and women that should never have been indicted.

A study of the statistics of convictions in proportion to the number of arrests and of convictions in proportion to defective indictments which have to be set aside, and, finally, the proportion of the convicted that finally go to prison, would prove most interesting.

When Mr. Jerome became District Attorney of New York County on the first of January, 1902, there were 640 untried indictments awaiting action at his hands. During his first four years in office he laid before the Grand Jury 20,228 complaints, but they granted only 15,937 indictments. As a result 4,291 complaints were thrown out of Court without any trial. Then of the 15,937 cases that went to trial, 6,150 were acquitted for lack of evidence and other technical reasons, making a grand total of 10,641 cases that were nullified by the Courts for want of legal evidence to convict.

Of the 9,787 so-called convictions, only about a third were convicted after a trial, the other defendants accepted pleas to lower offences, and given that alternative simply because the District Attorney feared that if they went to trial he would be unable to convict them.

In the Report of the Chief Clerk of the District Attorney’s Office, which is brought down to the close of 1908, there is no mention of the number of indictments secured by the Grand Jury last year, but it must have been three times the number of the convictions, which was 7,877 and then we must remember that by far the larger number of convictions were secured by giving the prisoner a plea to a lesser offence. As a rule when the Public Prosecutor permits a man to take a lower plea it shows that the case against him is poor.

There is no way to ascertain the number of innocent persons indicted, but if my judgment is correct the total is not small. How could it be otherwise, when the Grand Jury goes through its business in such a hurry. It should be observed also that the Grand Jurors themselves are not competent authorities in criminal law, and when efficiency in the work of prosecution is measured rather by the total number of persons indicted than by the percentage of those sent to prison, the weakness of the system becomes apparent.

The fault does not lie with the Grand Jury or with the District Attorney; it is with the system. The Grand Jury simply does as did other grand juries and the District Attorney does as did his predecessors.

To show that the Grand Jury as now constituted is unqualified to find indictments in a large number of crimes, I need only mention three cases which must have cost the County of New York in the neighborhood of millions of dollars, which if they had come originally before a Board of Criminal Experts, certainly never would have gone to trial on the weak indictments that sent all of the three defendants to the Death House.

The first was that of Maria Barberi, who was convicted of the murder of her sweetheart, Dominico Catalonica, July, 1895.

Catalonica had greatly wronged this woman, and then refused to marry her. While suffering under great mental excitement, after she found herself ruined and disgraced, and forever cast aside, she killed him. Although insane when she committed the deed, she nevertheless was tried and convicted and sentenced to the Electric Chair, but the Court of Appeals gave her a new trial. When all the facts came out at the second trial, she was justly acquitted.

The second case was that of Roland B. Molineux. He was indicted for the murder of Mrs. Adams in 1899. A board of trained experts, having two lawyers and physicians never would have convicted him, as there was no legal evidence to convict him of such a crime. He was convicted mainly on the evidence of paid handwriting experts. Doubtless, a hundred other persons might have been indicted for the same offense. At the second trial he was acquitted.

The third case was that of Albert T. Patrick, who was jointly indicted with Jones for the murder of William M. Rice. This is said to have been one of the strangest criminal cases that ever was tried in a Court of Justice. Nothing was done until Jones turned State’s evidence; then he said that he killed Millionaire Rice at the suggestion of Patrick, with chloroform. Patrick was convicted of murder in the first degree, and Jones allowed to go scot free. Since then, nine hundred reputable physicians have come forward and said in a petition to Governor Higgins for a pardon that Rice could not have been killed with chloroform. After being four years in the Death House, the Governor commuted Patrick’s sentence to life imprisonment.

If Patrick’s case had been carefully examined by a Board of Criminal Experts, he never would have been indicted, and the county would have been saved a vast amount of money, and needless trouble.

My plan is that a Board of Criminal Experts be organized and assume all the present powers of the Grand Jury, and in addition, classify all criminals; this board to consist of five persons—two experienced lawyers, two physicians or alienists and one business man. These five men should pass upon criminal matters, and when they find an indictment, give the proper classification to the accused.