Coroner’s juries are impaneled by that official to meet his own preconceived ideas and prejudices. There is no requirement that a coroner’s juror must even be able to read or write. The salary is $7 a day, and the Coroner has his favorites. Some men served as many as 31 times last year.
The Coroner frequently discharges the accused prisoners on grounds of justifiable homicide, despite evidence that they had committed other crimes at the same time, such as carrying concealed weapons or selling narcotics. The coroner then shrugs his shoulders and says those things are none of his business.
There have been known instances of jury fixing. Through the proper channels, a charge of a death caused by reckless driving has been reduced to an innocuous misdemeanor or dismissed completely. One of the coroner’s deputies was a notorious abortionist who performed the autopsies on his own victims.
Too bad Boss Shepherd isn’t around today. He could appreciate what the backroom boys have done to the District government.
32. MONARCHS OF THE METROPOLIS
Since wood-cuts added to the native press the element of pictorial illustration, cartoonists have caricatured the American alderman. His heavy foot is on the bottom rung of the legislative ladder. The “gray wolves” of Chicago were known around the globe for venality, degradation and cold-blooded chicanery. The Tammany members of the board, the San Francisco, Kansas City, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Boston, Albany and St. Louis “city fathers” were in their most nefarious days gangsters, brothel-keepers and police court shysters, overlaid with a refined sprinkling of saloon-keepers.
That mixture does not reflect the complexion of our Congress. But when, twice a month, they sit as the Board of Aldermen of the city of Washington, they are about as dignified and statesmanlike as the city council of Peoria.
The Constitution says, “The Congress shall have power to exercise exclusive legislation over such District.”
The actual detail of city government is delegated on the committee system and for all practical purposes the rulers of everything within the Columbia confines are 13 Senators and 25 Representatives on the District committees. In an extremity they can be overruled by their chambers and the President could veto any of their acts, but no one remembers when such a thing happened.