A. It is my impression that there was some one other person present, but I am not sure just now who it was.
Q. It was some official, some one well known, was it not . . . .?
A. I am not sure. . . .
[This conference was one in which Mr. McAdoo was reported to have participated.]
The gentle judge was distressed when in answer to a question by the government’s attorney as to what Mr. Zinkhan did when the prisoners were given into his charge, the warden replied:
A. I heard early in the afternoon of the sentence, and I did not get away from the Commissioners’ meeting until nearly 4 o’clock and I jumped in my machine and went down to the jail, and I think at that time six of them had been delivered there and were in the rotunda of the jail, and a few minutes after that a van load came. The remaining number of ten or twelve had not arrived, but inasmuch as the train had to leave at 5 o’clock and there would not be time enough to receive them in the jail and get them there in time for the train, I took the van that was there right over to the east end of the Union Station, and I think I took some of the others in my machine and another machine we had there carried some of the others over, and we telephoned the other van at Police Court to go direct to the east end of the Union Station and to deliver them to me. I had of course the commitments of those that were brought up to the jail—about 20 of them—and received from the officer of the court the other commitments of the last van load, and there I turned all of them except one that I kept back . . over to the receiving and discharging officer representing the District Workhouse, and they were taken down there that evening.
There followed some questioning of the uneasy warden as to how he used this power to decide which prisoners should remain in jail and which should be sent to Occoquan. Warden Zinkhan stuttered something about sending “all the able bodied prisoners to Occoquan—women able to perform useful work”—and that “humanitarian motives” usually guided him in his selection. It was a difficult task for the warden for he had to conceal just why the suffrage prisoners were sent to Occoquan, and in so doing had to invent “motives” of his own.
Q. [By defense.] Mr. Zinkhan, were you or were you not actuated by humanitarian motives when you sent this group of women to the Occoquan Workhouse?
A. Yes.
Q. Were you actuated by humanitarian motives when you sent Mrs. Nolan, a woman of 73 years, to the workhouse? Did you think that she could perform some service at Occoquan that it was necessary to get her out of district jail and go down there?