Only a few years ago the editor of a small monthly paper in this city was promptly indicted by the Grand Jury for libel for exposing the rascality of Insurance grafters, a work which Governor Hughes has since done legally before the Assembly Investigating Committee. At the time we mention when the insurance grafters were cut to the heart by the trenchant articles that exposed their conduct to public scorn, they went before the Grand Jury and charged this Insurance man with libel. They were permitted to tell a one-sided story to the Grand Jury, so as to silence this critic. Of course he was not allowed to make any reply till after he was brought into Court and branded as a felon. The indictment was afterwards quashed and he received some damages.
And this is but a fair sample of how hundreds of men have been ruined by such unjust methods. In this case the Grand Jury simply did what they were told to do by the District Attorney, he having been wrongly informed by the insurance grafters.
Board of Criminal Experts
Under a paid Board of Criminal Experts, sitting daily from 10 a. m. till 5 p. m., and who are there to investigate, sift and go to the bottom of things generally, the rich and the poor would have a better chance of receiving justice meted out to them.
A very common opinion, which is gaining ground every day, and which is in some respects true, is that big criminals go unpunished, while others who are lawfully convicted of crime command such influence with the courts or high political powers that they are able to obtain their freedom by parole or pardon or get off with a very light sentence.
Others, after being lawfully convicted, are able to cheat the prison, provided they have money to fight their case in the higher courts and thus obtain a new trial which in the end means an acquittal. All this tends to bring contempt on our courts and occasionally invites the people to take the law into their own hands. We have too many indictments to-day and too few convictions. Millions of dollars of the people’s money are often wasted on cases where there is no chance of conviction. The courts are cumbered with hundreds of cases of men and women that should never have been indicted.
A study of the statistics of convictions in proportion to the number of arrests and of convictions in proportion to defective indictments which have to be set aside, and, finally, the proportion of the convicted that finally go to prison, would prove most interesting.
When Mr. Jerome became District Attorney of New York County on the first of January, 1902, there were 640 untried indictments awaiting action at his hands. During his first four years in office he laid before the Grand Jury 20,228 complaints, but they granted only 15,937 indictments. As a result 4,291 complaints were thrown out of Court without any trial. Then of the 15,937 cases that went to trial, 6,150 were acquitted for lack of evidence and other technical reasons, making a grand total of 10,641 cases that were nullified by the Courts for want of legal evidence to convict.
Of the 9,787 so-called convictions, only about a third were convicted after a trial, the other defendants accepted pleas to lower offences, and given that alternative simply because the District Attorney feared that if they went to trial he would be unable to convict them.
In the Report of the Chief Clerk of the District Attorney’s Office, which is brought down to the close of 1908, there is no mention of the number of indictments secured by the Grand Jury last year, but it must have been three times the number of the convictions, which was 7,877 and then we must remember that by far the larger number of convictions were secured by giving the prisoner a plea to a lesser offence. As a rule when the Public Prosecutor permits a man to take a lower plea it shows that the case against him is poor.