Greasing the Machinery of the Law
Frequently the prosecutor in a criminal court, under the cloak of having a duty to perform, proceeds to do it with the vengeance of a fiend, and the bias and prejudice of a persecutor, and perhaps with murder in his heart.
Nor are we without numerous instances where the prosecutor or some of his assistants have been known to “gear” the machinery of the law so as to convict some unfortunate of a crime of which there was absolutely no evidence, except what was manufactured for the occasion. In doing such work, the police can always be relied upon for a certain amount of help, which they never fail to give. Then there is in every community certain degenerates, including emotional and hysterical men and women, ready to swear to anything asked of them, and who spring into fame during a sensational trial, not to mention the professional juror who draws two dollars a day for sitting around the court house, who is largely dependent on the public prosecutor for his sinecure.
There are thousands of people who all their lives have been the victims of cruelty, oppression and malicious persecution, but real justice they have not known. There are innocent men in nearly all of our penal institutions, who have suffered because of false swearers. They may appeal to an Executive, even a righteous one, who has so many intolerable conscientious scruples on the question of pardoning crooks that the poor, friendless prisoner is allowed to rot in prison, so that the righteous Governor may make no mistake.
But the innocent have this consolation, that their case has been sent up to Heaven’s Court of Appeals, where in God’s good time a just verdict will be rendered in their favor.
But what a crime it is to send an unfortunate to the Electric Chair, or State Prison for life, or even a limited term in jail, on manufactured evidence or opinions of an alienist, or a handwriting expert, who are given large fees for their testimony! Handwriting experts have made so many mistakes in the past that it is absolutely impossible to believe them. They may think themselves famous as interpreters of dots, curves, right angles and horizontal lines, but they cannot positively tell whether John Doe or John Jones wrote the document, and human opinions are not evidence. It is certainly a miscarriage of justice to convict any man or woman on such absurd testimony. If you have plenty of money, you can prove anything you please by the use of such expert testimony, or disprove it. But without the most absolute corroboration, expert testimony is worthless.