Months after, when men had been indicted for endeavoring to influence jurors to vote for Ruef’s acquittal in the United Railroads case, Isaac Penny, who had acted as foreman of the jury that failed to agree in the Parkside case, in a public statement denounced that jury as not honest. “Had I known then,” said Penny in an interview printed in the San Francisco Call, September 30, 1908, “what I have since learned about jury tampering, I would have sprung a sensation in Judge Dooling’s court that would have resulted in the haling of numerous men before the court. * * * I have been turning this over again and again in my mind, and there is but one answer—that jury was not an honest one.”
Later, Penny gave sensational testimony along this line in Judge Lawlor’s court.
From one end of the State to the other, Judge Dunne was warmly commended as a jurist and a man. “The name of Judge Dunne,” said the Pasadena News, “stands in California honored among honest men because of the enemies he has made. Every politician and every newspaper that has defended bribery and sought to embarrass the graft prosecution is against Judge Dunne. They stocked a political convention against him. Judge Dunne’s defeat in San Francisco would be a disgrace to that city and a reflection on the honor and intelligence of the people of California.”
“The corrupt corporation organs,” said the Sacramento Bee, “and the servile journalistic tools of the predatory rich—such as the Argonaut, for instance—are barking in unison at the heels of Judge Dunne in San Francisco and declaring he is unfit to sit on the bench. Dunne’s crime in their eyes is that he did his simple, plain duty in the graft prosecution cases. If he had neglected that duty, to tip the scales of Justice over to favor the ‘higher ups,’ the same gang, with the Argonaut in the lead, would be praising him to the skies as a most just judge, a righteous judge, and would be clamoring for his re-election.”
Of the “fixing of juries,” The Chronicle in its issue of September 19, 1908, said: “Every move made in the Ruef trials gives moral evidence that systematic bribery of juries is being practiced which is as convincing to the public as were the signs of corruption during the entire Schmitz regime, but before the explosion. Nobody doubted then that the Mayor, the Supervisors and all officials appointed by Schmitz were thieves. Nobody doubts now that all through these graft trials there has been systematic corruption of juries. In private conversation it is treated as a matter of course. Nobody, of course, could ‘prove’ it. Nobody needs legal proof to be convinced.”
Of the incident, The Call said in its issue of September 19, 1908: “For a long time there has been every reason to believe that veniremen summoned to try Ruef were being bribed or promised bribes to vote for acquittal. The dubious character of Ruef’s attorneys, or some of them, and their known affiliations were wholly consistent with this theory. Circumstances not amounting to absolute proof, but giving cause for strong suspicion, came to the surface from time to time. The jury fixers grew bolder with impunity, and, in fine, the pitcher went to the well once too often.”