Chapter XV.
Defeat of the Commonwealth Club Bills.
Drawn By Committees of the Ablest San Francisco Attorneys Not Under
Retainer of Prison-Dodging Captains of Industry - Measures Not Allowed
to Reach Senate or Assembly, but Killed in Committees - Grove L.
Johnson's Keen Opposition.
The graft prosecution at San Francisco not only brought the fact squarely before the public that large corporations sometimes catch the easiest way to achieve their purposes by bribing public officials, but that it is a deal easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than a millionaire offender through the legal cobwebs of technicality to a cell at San Quentin or Folsom[72].
That the technical defense in criminal cases was subject to grave abuses had been generally recognized. But it took the graft cases at San Francisco to fairly rub this unpleasant fact into the law-abiding element. Because for the first time in the practice of criminal law in California, unlimited wealth was available to employ the best legal talent to defend men under indictment.
The defending lawyers took advantage of every technicality. They emphasized the most trivial of them. Gradually it began to dawn upon The People that here were legal refuges, based upon the most absurd of technicalities, the sweeping away of which would in no way injure the substantial rights of a person charged with crime, refuges which were available to the rich man but denied to the poor or moderately well-to-do.
To be sure, any person accused could make his technical defense if he had the means to employ the necessary counsel. But in face of the astonishing performances going on in the courts at San Francisco, it soon became apparent to the thoughtful, that no man, whose fortune was expressed in terms of less than five ciphers could make such a defense.
Thus the unpalatable truth was forced home, that we have in California a technical defense available for the rich man charged with crime, which is in effect denied even those of the so-called middle classes.
With this conviction came demand of reform of the criminal laws to ensure:
(1) A prompt trial of an accused person on the merits of the case.