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Courts and Criminals

by Arthur Cheney Train · English · Gutenberg #5268 · 422,031 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Courts and Criminals

Author: Arthur Cheney Train


        
Release date: March 1, 2004 [eBook #5268]
                Most recently updated: March 26, 2009

Language: English

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Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer





COURTS AND CRIMINALS


By Arthur Train



These essays, which were written between the years 1905-1910 are
reprinted without revision, although in a few minor instances the laws
may have been changed.




CHAPTER I. The Pleasant Fiction of the Presumption of Innocence


There was a great to-do some years ago in the city of New York over an
ill-omened young person, Duffy by name, who, falling into the bad
graces of the police, was most incontinently dragged to headquarters
and "mugged" without so much as "By your leave, sir," on the part of the
authorities. Having been photographed and measured (in most humiliating
fashion) he was turned loose with a gratuitous warning to behave himself
in the future and see to it that he did nothing which might gain him
even more invidious treatment.

Now, although many thousands of equally harmless persons had been
similarly treated, this particular outrage was made the occasion of a
vehement protest to the mayor of the city by a certain member of the
judiciary, who pointed out that such things in a civilized community
were shocking beyond measure, and called upon the mayor to remove the
commissioner of police and all his staff of deputy commissioners for
openly violating the law which they were sworn to uphold. But, the
commissioner of police, who had sometimes enforced the penal statutes in
a way to make him unpopular with machine politicians, saw nothing wrong
in what he had done, and, what was more, said so most outspokenly.
The judge said, "You did," and the commissioner said, "I didn't."
Specifically, the judge was complaining of what had been done to
Duffy, but more generally he was charging the police with despotism and
oppression and with systematically disregarding the sacred liberties of
the citizens which it was their duty to protect.

Accordingly the mayor decided to look into the matter for himself, and
after a lengthy investigation came to the alleged conclusion that the
"mugging" of Duffy was a most reprehensible thing and that all those who
were guilty of having any part therein should be instantly removed
from office. He, therefore, issued a pronunciamento to the commissioner
demanding the official heads of several of his subordinates, which order
the commissioner politely declined to obey. The mayor thereupon removed
him and appointed a successor, ostensibly for the purpose of having in
the office a man who should conduct the police business of the city with
more regard for the liberties of the inhabitants thereof. The judge
who had started the rumpus expressed himself as very much pleased and
declared that now at last a new era had dawned wherein the government
was to be administered with a due regard for law.

Now, curiously enough, although the judge had demanded the removal of
the commissioner on the ground that he had violated the law and been
guilty of tyrannous and despotic conduct, the mayor had ousted him
not for pursuing an illegal course in arresting and "mugging" a
presumptively innocent man (for illegal it most undoubtedly was), but
for inefficiency and maladministration in his department.

Said the mayor in his written opinion:


"After thinking over this matter with the greatest care, I am led to the
conclusion that as mayor of the city of New York I should not order
the police to stop taking photographs of people arrested and accused of
crime or who have been indicted by grand juries. That grave injustice
may occur the Duffy case has demonstrated, but I feel that it is not the
taking of the photograph that has given cause to the injustice, but the
inefficiency and maladministration of the police department, etc."

In other words, the mayor set the seal of his official approval upon
the very practice which caused the injustice to Duffy. "Mugging" was all
right, so long as you "mugged" the right persons.

The situation thus outlined was one of more than passing interest. A
sensitive point in our governmental nervous system had been touched and
a condition uncovered that sooner or later must be diagnosed and cured.

For the police have no right to arrest and photograph a citizen
unconvicted of crime, since it is contrary to law. And it is ridiculous
to assert that the very guardians of the law may violate it so long as
they do so judiciously and do not molest the Duffys. The trouble goes
deeper than that. The truth is that we are up against that most delicate
of situations, the concrete adjustment of a theoretical individual right
to a practical necessity. The same difficulty has always existed and
will always continue to exist whenever emergencies requiring prompt
and decisive action arise or conditions obtain that must be handled
effectively without too much discussion. It is easy while sitting on the
piazza with your cigar to recognize the rights of your fellow-men, you
may assert most vigorously the right of the citizen to immunity from
arrest without legal cause, but if you saw a seedy character sneaking
down a side street at three o'clock in the morning, his pockets bulging
with jewelry and silver! Would you have the policeman on post insist
on the fact that a burglary had been committed being established beyond
peradventure before arresting the suspect, who in the meantime would
undoubtedly escape? Of course, the worthy officer sometimes does this,
but his conduct in that case becomes the subject of an investigation
on the part of his superiors. In fact, the rules of the New York police
department require him to arrest all persons carrying bags in the small
hours who cannot give a satisfactory account of themselves. Yet there
is no such thing under the laws of the State as a right "to arrest on
suspicion." No citizen may be arrested under the statutes unless a crime
has actually been committed. Thus, the police regulations deliberately
compel every officer either to violate the law or to be made the subject
of charges for dereliction of duty. A confusing state of things, truly,
to a man who wants to do his duty by himself and by his fellow-citizens!

The present author once wrote a book dealing with the practical
administration of criminal justice, in which the unlawfulness of arrest
on mere "suspicion" was discussed at length and given a prominent place.
But when the time came for publication that portion of it was omitted
at the earnest solicitation of certain of the authorities on the ground
that as such arrests were absolutely necessary for the enforcement
of the criminal law a public exposition of their illegality would do
infinite harm. Now, as it seems, the time has come when the facts, for
one reason or another, should be faced. The difficulty does not end,
however, with "arrest on suspicion," "the third degree," "mugging," or
their allied abuses. It really goes to the root of our whole theory of
the administration of the criminal law. Is it possible that on final
analysis we may find that our enthusiastic insistence upon certain of
the supposedly fundamental liberties of the individual has led us into
a condition of legal hypocrisy vastly less desirable than the frank
attitude of our continental neighbors toward such subjects?

The Massachusetts Constitution of 1785 concludes with the now famous
words: "To the end that this may be a government of laws and not of
men." That is the essence of the spirit of American government. Our
forefathers had arisen and thrown off the yoke of England and her
intolerable system of penal government, in which an accused had no
right to testify in his own behalf and under which he could be hung
for stealing a sheep. "Liberty!" "Liberty or death!" That was the note
ringing in the minds and mouths of the signers of the Declaration and
framers of the Constitution. That is the popular note to-day of the
Fourth of July orator and of the Memorial Day address. This liberty was
to be guaranteed by laws in such a way that it was never to be curtailed
or violated. No mere man was to be given an opportunity to tamper
with it. The individual was to be protected at all costs. No king, or
sheriff, or judge, or officer was to lay his finger on a free man
save at his peril. If he did, the free man might immediately have his
"law"--"have the law on him," as the good old expression was--for no
king or sheriff was above the law. In fact, we were so energetic in
providing safeguards for the individual, even when a wrong-doer, that we
paid very little attention to the effectiveness of kings or sheriffs or
what we had substituted for them. And so it is to-day. What candidate
for office, what silver-tongued orator or senator, what demagogue or
preacher could hold his audience or capture a vote if, when it came to a
question of liberty, he should lift up his voice in behalf of the rights
of the majority as against the individual?

Accordingly in devising our laws We have provided in every possible way
for the freedom of the citizen from all interference on the part of the
authorities. No one may be stopped, interrogated, examined, or arrested
unless a crime has been committed. Every one is presumed to be innocent
until shown to be guilty by the verdict of a jury. No one's premises
may be entered or searched without a warrant which the law renders it
difficult to obtain. Every accused has the right to testify in his own
behalf, like any other witness. The fact that he has been held for a
crime by a magistrate and indicted by a grand jury places him at not the
slightest disadvantage so far as defending himself against the charge
is concerned, for he must be proven guilty beyond any reasonable
doubt. These illustrations of the jealousy of the law for the rights of
citizens might be multiplied to no inconsiderable extent. Further,
our law allows a defendant convicted of crime to appeal to the highest
courts, whereas if he be acquitted the people or State of New York have
no right of appeal at all.

Without dwelling further on the matter it is enough to say that in
general the State constitutions, their general laws, or penal statutes
provide that a person who is accused or suspected of crime must be
presumed innocent and treated accordingly until his guilt has been
affirmatively established in a jury trial; that meantime he must not be
confined or detained unless a crime has in fact been committed and there
is at least reasonable cause to believe that he has committed it; and,
further, that if arrested he must be given an immediate opportunity
to secure bail, to have the advice of counsel, and must in no way be
compelled to give any evidence against himself. So much for the law. It
is as plain as a pikestaff. It is printed in the books in words of
one syllable. So far as the law is concerned we have done our best
to perpetuate the theories of those who, fearing that they might be
arrested without a hearing, transported for trial, and convicted in a
king's court before a king's judge for a crime they knew nothing of,
insisted on "liberty or death." They had had enough of kings and their
ways. Hereafter they were to have "a government of laws and not of men."

But the unfortunate fact remains that all laws, however perfect, must in
the end be administered by imperfect men. There is, alas! no such thing
as a government of laws and not of men. You may have a government
more of laws and less of men, or vice versa, but you cannot have an
auto-administration of the Golden Rule. Sooner or later you come to a
man--in the White House, or on a wool sack, or at a desk in an office,
or in a blue coat and brass buttons--and then, to a very considerable
extent, the question of how far ours is to be a government of laws or of
men depends upon him. Generally, so far as he is concerned, it is going
to be of man, for every official finds that the letter of the law works
an injustice many times out of a hundred. If he is worth his salary he
will try to temper justice with mercy. If he is human he will endeavor
to accomplish justice as he sees it so long as the law can be stretched
to accommodate the case. Thus, inevitably there is a conflict
between the law and its application. It is the human element in the
administration of the law that enables lawyers to get a living. It is
usually not difficult to tell what the law is; the puzzle is how it
is going to be applied in any individual case. How it is going to be
applied depends very largely upon the practical side of the matter and
the exigencies of existing conditions.

It is pretty hard to apply inflexibly laws over a hundred years old. It
is equally hard to police a city of a million or so polyglot inhabitants
with a due regard to their theoretic constitutional rights. But suppose
in addition that these theoretic rights are entirely theoretic and fly
in the face of the laws of nature, experience, and common sense? What
then? What is a police commissioner to do who has either got to make an
illegal arrest or let a crook get away, who must violate the rights of
men illegally detained by outrageously "mugging" them or egregiously
fail to have a record of the professional criminals in his bailiwick?
He does just what all of us do under similar conditions--he "takes a
chance." But in the case of the police the thing is so necessary that
there ceases practically to be any "chance" about it. They have got to
prevent crime and arrest criminals. If they fail they are out of a
job, and others more capable or less scrupulous take their places. The
fundamental law qualifying all systems is that of necessity. You can't
let professional crooks carry off a voter's silverware simply because
the voter, being asleep, is unable instantly to demonstrate beyond
a reasonable doubt that his silver has been stolen. You can't permit
burglars to drag sacks of loot through the streets of the city at 4 A.M.
simply because they are presumed to be innocent until proven guilty. And
if "arrest on suspicion" were not permitted, demanded by the public,
and required by the police ordinances, away would go the crooks and off
would go the silverware, the town would be full of "leather snatchers"
and "strong-arm men," respectable citizens would be afraid to go out o'
nights, and liberty would degenerate into license. That is the point. We
Americans, or at least some of the newer ones of us, have an idea that
"liberty" means the right to steal apples from our neighbor's orchard
without interference. Now, somewhere or other, there has got to be a
switch and a strong arm to keep us in order, and the switch and arm must
not wait until the apples are stolen and eaten before getting busy. If
we come climbing over the fence sweating apples at every pore, is Farmer
Jones to go and count his apples before grabbing us?

The most presumptuous of all presumptions is this "presumption of
innocence." It really doesn't exist, save in the mouths of judges and in
the pages of the law books. Yet as much to-do is made about it as if
it were a living legal principle. Every judge in a criminal case is
required to charge the jury in form or substance somewhat as follows:
"The defendant is presumed to be innocent until that presumption is
removed by competent evidence"... "This presumption is his property,
remaining with him throughout the trial and until rebutted by the
verdict of the jury."... "The jury has no right to consider the fact
that the defendant stands at the bar accused of a crime by an indictment
found by the grand jury." Shades of Sir Henry Hawkins! Does the judge
expect that they are actually to swallow that? Here is a jury sworn "to
a true verdict find" in the case of an ugly looking customer at the bar
who is charged with knocking down an old man and stealing his watch. The
old man--an apostolic looking octogenarian--is sitting right over there
where the jury can see him. One look at the plaintiff and one at the
accused and the jury may be heard to mutter, "He's guilty,--all right!"

"Presumed to be innocent?" Why, may I ask? Do not the jury and everybody
else know that this good old man would never, save by mistake, accuse
anybody falsely of crime? Innocence! Why, the natural and inevitable
presumption is that the defendant is guilty! The human mind works
intuitively by comparison and experience. We assume or presume with
considerable confidence that parents love their children, that all
college presidents are great and good men, and that wild bulls are
dangerous animals. We may be wrong. But it is up to the other fellow to
show us the contrary.

Now, if out of a clear sky Jones accuses Robinson of being a thief we
know by experience that the chances are largely in favor of Jones's
accusation being well founded. People as a rule don't go rushing around
charging each other with being crooks unless they have some reason
for it. Thus, at the very beginning the law flies in the face of
probabilities when it tells us that a man accused of crime must be
presumed to be innocent. In point of fact, whatever presumption there is
(and this varies with the circumstances) is all the other way, greater
or less depending upon the particular attitude of mind and experience of
the individual.

This natural presumption of guilt from the mere fact of the charge is
rendered all the more likely by reason of the uncharitable readiness
with which we believe evil of our fellows. How unctuously we repeat some
hearsay bit of scandal. "I suppose you have heard the report that
Deacon Smith has stolen the church funds?" we say to our friends with a
sententious sigh--the outward sign of an invisible satisfaction. Deacon
Smith after the money-bag? Ha! ha! Of course, he's guilty! These deacons
are always guilty! And in a few minutes Deacon Smith is ruined forever,
although the fact of the matter may well have been that he was but
counting the money in the collection-plate. This willingness to believe
the worst of others is a matter of common knowledge and of historical
and literary record. "The evil that men do lives after them--" It might
well have been put, "The evil men are said to have done lives forever."
However unfair, this is a psychologic condition which plays an important
part in rendering the presumption of innocence a gross absurdity.

But let us press the history of Jones and Robinson a step further. The
next event in the latter's criminal history is his appearance in
court before a magistrate. Jones produces his evidence and calls his
witnesses. Robinson, through his learned counsel, cross-examines
them and then summons his own witnesses to prove his innocence. The
proceeding may take several days or perhaps weeks. Briefs are submitted.
The magistrate considers the testimony and finally decides that he
believes Robinson guilty and must hold him for the action of the
grand jury. You might now, it would perhaps seem, have some reason for
suspecting that Robinson was not all that he should be. But no! He is
still presumed in the eyes of the law, and theoretically in the eyes of
his fellows, to be as innocent as a babe unborn. And now the grand jury
take up and sift the evidence that has already been gone over by the
police judge. They, too, call witnesses and take additional testimony.
They likewise are convinced of Robinson's guilt and straightway hand
down an indictment accusing him of the crime. A bench warrant issues.
The defendant is run to earth and ignominiously haled to court. But he
is still presumed to be innocent! Does not the law say so? And is not
this a "government of laws"? Finally, the district attorney, who is not
looking for any more work than is absolutely necessary, investigates the
case, decides that it must be tried and begins to prepare it for trial.
As the facts develop themselves Robinson's guilt becomes more and more
clear. The unfortunate defendant is given any opportunity he may desire
to explain away the charge, but to no purpose.

The district attorney knows Robinson is guilty, and so does everybody
else, including Robinson. At last this presumably innocent man is
brought to the bar for trial. The jury scan his hang-dog countenance
upon which guilt is plainly written. They contrast his appearance with
that of the honest Jones. They know he has been accused, held by a
magistrate, indicted by a grand jury, and that his case, after careful
scrutiny, has been pressed for trial by the public prosecutor. Do they
really presume him innocent? Of course not. They presume him guilty. "So
soon as I see him come through dot leetle door in the back of the room,
then I know he's guilty!" as the foreman said in the old story. What
good does the presumption of innocence, so called, do for the miserable
Robinson? None whatever--save perhaps to console him in the long days
pending his trial. But such a legal hypocrisy could never have deceived
anybody. How much better it would be to cast aside all such cant and
frankly admit that the attitude of the continental law toward the man
under arrest is founded upon common sense and the experience of mankind.
If he is the wrong man it should not be difficult for him to demonstrate
the fact. At any rate circumstances are against him, and he should be
anxious to explain them away if he can.

The fact of the matter is, that in dealing with practical conditions,
police methods differ very little in different countries. The
authorities may perhaps keep considerably more detailed "tabs" on people
in Europe than in the United States, but if they are once caught in a
compromising position they experience about the same treatment wherever
they happen to be. In France (and how the apostles of liberty condemn
the iniquity of the administration of criminal justice in that country!)
the suspect or undesirable receives a polite official call or note, in
which he is invited to leave the locality as soon as convenient. In
New York he is arrested by a plainclothes man, yanked down to Mulberry
Street for the night, and next afternoon is thrust down the gangplank
of a just departing Fall River liner. Many an inspector has earned
unstinted praise (even from the New York Evening Post) by "clearing New
York of crooks" or having a sort of "round-up" of suspicious characters
whom, after proper identification, he has ejected from the city by the
shortest and quickest possible route. Yet in the case of every person
thus arrested and driven out of the town he has undoubtedly violated
constitutional rights and taken the law into his own hands.

What redress can a penniless tramp secure against a stout inspector of
police able and willing to spend a considerable sum of money in his own
defence, and with the entire force ready and eager to get at the tramp
and put him out of business? He swallows his pride, if he has any, and
ruefully slinks out of town for a period of enforced abstinence from the
joys of metropolitan existence. Yet who shall say that, in spite of the
fact that it is a theoretic outrage upon liberty, this cleaning out of
the city is not highly desirable? One or two comparatively innocent men
may be caught in the ruck, but they generally manage to intimate to the
police that the latter have "got them wrong" and duly make their
escape. The others resume their tramp from city to city, clothed in the
presumption of their innocence.

Since the days of the Doges or of the Spanish Inquisition there has
never been anything like the morning inspection or "line up" of arrested
suspects at the New York police head-quarters.* (*Now abolished.) One by
one the unfortunate persons arrested during the previous night (although
not charged with any crime) are pointed out to the assembled detective
force, who scan them from beneath black velvet masks in order that they
themselves may not be recognized when they meet again on Broadway or
the darker side streets of the city. Each prisoner is described and his
character and past performances are rehearsed by the inspector or head
of the bureau. He is then measured, "mugged," and, if lucky, turned
loose. What does his liberty amount to or his much-vaunted legal rights
if the city is to be made safe? Yet why does not some apostle of liberty
raise his voice and cry aloud concerning the wrong that has been done?
Are not the rights of a beggar as sacred as those of a bishop?

One of the most sacred rights guaranteed under the law is that of not
being compelled to give evidence against ourselves or to testify to
anything which might degrade or incriminate us. Now, this is all very
fine for the chap who has his lawyer at his elbow or has had some
similar previous experience. He may wisely shut up like a clam and set
at defiance the tortures of the third degree. But how about the poor
fellow arrested on suspicion of having committed a murder, who has never
heard of the legal provision in question, or, if he has, is cajoled or
threatened into "answering one or two questions"? Few police officers
take the trouble to warn those whom they arrest that what they say may
be used against them. What is the use? Of course, when they testify
later at the trial they inevitably begin their testimony with the
stereotyped phrase, "I first warned the defendant that anything which
he said might be used against him." If they did warn him they probably
whispered it or mumbled it so that he didn't hear what they said, or,
in any event, whether they said it or not, half a dozen of them probably
took him into a back room and, having set him with his back against the
wall, threatened and swore at him until he told them what he knew, or
thought he knew, and perhaps confessed his crime. When the case comes to
trial the police give the impression that the accused quietly summoned
them to his cell to make a voluntary statement. The defendant denies
this, of course, but the evidence goes in and the harm has been done. No
doubt the methods of the inquisition are in vogue the world over under
similar conditions. Everybody knows that a statement by the accused
immediately upon his arrest is usually the most important evidence that
can be secured in any case. It is a police officer's duty to secure one
if he can do so by legitimate means. It is his custom to secure one
by any means in his power. As his oath, that such a statement was
voluntary, makes it ipso facto admissible as evidence, the statutes
providing that a defendant cannot be compelled to give evidence against
himself are practically nullified.

In the more important cases the accused is usually put through some sort
of an inquisitorial process by the captain at the station-house. If
he is not very successful at getting anything out of the prisoner the
latter is turned over to the sergeant and a couple of officers who can
use methods of a more urgent character. If the prisoner is arrested
by headquarters detectives, various efficient devices to compel him to
"give up what he knows" may be used--such as depriving him of food and
sleep, placing him in a cell with a "stool pigeon" who will try to worm
a confession out of him, and the usual moral suasion of a heart-to-heart
talk in the back room with the inspector.

This is the darker side of the picture of practical government. It
is needless to say that the police do not always suggest the various
safeguards and privileges which the law accords to defendants thus
arrested, but the writer is free to confess that, save in exceptional
cases, he believes the rigors of the so-called third degree to be
greatly exaggerated. Frequently in dealing with rough men rough methods
are used, but considering the multitude of offenders, and the thousands
of police officers, none of whom have been trained in a school of
gentleness, it is surprising that severer treatment is not generally
met with on the part of those who run afoul of the criminal law. The
ordinary "cop" tries to do his duty as effectively as he can. With the
average citizen gruffness and roughness go a long way in the assertion
of authority. In the task of policing a big city, the rights of the
individual must indubitably suffer to a certain extent if the rights
of the multitude are to be properly protected. We can make too much of
small injustices and petty incivilities. Police business is not gentle
business. The officers are trying to prevent you and me from being
knocked on the head some dark night or from being chloroformed in our
beds. Ten thousand men are trying to do a thirty-thousand-man job. The
struggle to keep the peace and put down crime is a hard one anywhere.
It requires a strong arm that cannot show too punctilious a regard for
theoretical rights when prompt decisions have to be made and equally
prompt action taken. The thieves and gun men have got to be driven
out. Suspicious characters have got to be locked up. Somehow or other a
record must be kept of professional criminals and persons likely to
be active in law-breaking. These are necessities in every civilized
country. They are necessities here. Society employs the same methods of
self-protection the world over. No one presumes a person charged with
crime to be innocent, either in Delhi, Pekin, Moscow, or New York. Under
proper circumstances we believe him guilty. When he comes to be tried
the jury consider the evidence, and if they are reasonably sure he is
guilty they convict him. The doctrine of reasonable doubt is almost as
much of a fiction as that of the presumption of innocence. From the
time a man is arrested until arraignment he is quizzed with a view to
inducing him to admit his offence or give some evidence that may help
convict him. Logically, why should not a person charged with a crime
be obliged to give what explanation he can of the affair? Why should he
have the privilege of silence? Doesn't he owe a duty to the public the
same as any other witness? If he is innocent he has nothing to fear; if
he is guilty--away with him! The French have no false ideas about such
things and at the same time they have a high regard for liberty. We
merely cheat ourselves into thinking that our liberty is something
different from French liberty because we have a lot of laws upon our
statute books that are there only to be disregarded and would have to be
repealed instantly if enforced.

Take, for instance, the celebrated provision of the penal laws that the
failure of an accused to testify in his own behalf shall not be taken
against him. Such a doctrine flies in the face of human nature. If a
man sits silent when witnesses under oath accuse him of a crime it is an
inevitable inference that he has nothing to say--that no explanation of
his would explain. The records show that the vast majority of accused
persons who do not avail themselves of the opportunity to testify are
convicted. Thus, the law which permits a defendant to testify in reality
compels him to testify, and a much-invoked safeguard of liberty turns
out to be a privilege in name only. In France or America alike a man
accused of crime sooner or later has to tell what he knows--or take
his medicine. It makes little difference whether he does so under the
legalized interrogation of a "juge d'instruction" in Paris or under the
quasi-voluntary examination of an assistant district attorney or police
inspector in New York. It is six of one and half a dozen of the other if
at his trial in France he remains mute under examination or in America
refrains from availing himself of the privilege of testifying in his own
behalf.

Thus, we are reluctantly forced to the conclusion that all human
institutions have their limitations, and that, however theoretically
perfect a government of laws may be, it must be administered by men
whose chief regard will not be the idealization of a theory of liberty
so much as an immediate solution of some concrete problem.

Not that the matter, after all, is particularly important to most of us,
but laws which exist only to be broken create a disrespect and disregard
for law which may ultimately be dangerous. It would be perfectly simple
for the legislature to say that a citizen might be arrested under
circumstances tending to create a reasonable suspicion, even if he had
not committed a crime, and it would be quite easy to pass a statute
providing that the commissioner of police might "mug" and measure all
criminals immediately after conviction. As it is, the prison authorities
won't let him, so he has to do it while he has the opportunity.

It must be admitted that this is rather hard on the innocent, but they
now have to suffer with the guilty for the sins of an indolent and
uninterested legislature. Moreover, if such a right of arrest were
proposed, some wiseacre or politician would probably rise up and
denounce the suggestion as the first step in the direction of a military
dictatorship. Thus, we shall undoubtedly fare happily on in the
blissful belief that our personal liberties are the subject of the most
solicitous and zealous care on the part of the authorities, guaranteed
to us under a government which is not of men but of laws, until one
of us happens to be arrested (by mistake, of course) and learns by sad
experience the practical methods of the police in dealing with criminals
and the agreeable but deceptive character of the pleasant fiction of the
presumption of innocence.




CHAPTER II. Preparing a Criminal Case for Trial


When the prosecuting attorney in a great criminal trial arises to open
the case to the impanelled jury, very few, if any, of them have the
slightest conception of the enormous expenditure of time, thought and
labor which has gone into the preparation of the case and made possible
his brief and easily delivered speech. For in this opening address of
his there must be no flaw, since a single misstated or overstated fact
may prejudice the jury against him and result in his defeat. Upon
it also depends the jury's first impression of the case and of the
prosecutor himself--no inconsiderable factor in the result. In a trial
of importance its careful construction with due regard to what facts
shall be omitted (in order to enhance their dramatic effect when
ultimately proven) may well occupy the district attorney every evening
for a week. But if the speech itself has involved study and travail, it
is as nothing compared with the amount required by that most important
feature of every criminal case--the selection of the jury.

For a month before the trial, or whenever it may be that the jury has
been drawn, every member upon the panel has been subjected to an unseen
scrutiny. The prosecutor, through his own or through hired sleuths, has
examined into the family history, the business standing and methods, the
financial responsibility, the political and social affiliations, and the
personal habits and "past performances" of each and every talesman. When
at the beginning of the trial they, one by one, take the witness-chair
(on what is called the voir dire) to subject themselves to an
examination by both sides as to their fitness to serve as jurors in
the case, the district attorney probably has close fit hand a rather
detailed account of each, and perchance has great difficulty in
restraining a smile. When some prospective juror, in his eagerness
either to serve or to escape, deliberately equivocates in answer to an
important question as to his personal history.

"Are you acquainted with the accused or his family?" mildly inquires the
assistant prosecutor. "No--not at all," the talesman may blandly reply.

The answer, perhaps, is literally true, and yet the prosecutor may be
pardoned for murmuring

"Liar!" to himself as he sees that his memorandum concerning the juror's
qualifications states that he belongs to the same "lodge" with the
prisoner's uncle by marriage and carries an open account on his books
with the defendant's father.

"I think we will excuse Mr. Ananias," politely remarks the prosecutor;
then in an undertone he turns to his chief and mutters: "The old rascal!
He would have knifed us if we'd given him the chance!" And all this time
the disgruntled Mr. Ananias is wondering why, if he didn't "know the
defendant or his family," he was not accepted as a juror.

Of course, every district attorney has, or should have, information as
to each talesman's actual capabilities as a juror and something of
a record as to how he has acted under fire. If he is a member of the
"special" panel, it is easy to find out whether he has ever acquitted
or convicted in any cause celebre, and if he has acquitted any plainly
guilty defendant in the past it is not likely that his services will
be required. If, however, he has convicted in such a case the district
attorney may try to lure the other side into accepting him by making
it appear that he himself is doubtful as to the juror's desirability.
Sometimes persons accused of crime themselves, and actually under
indictment, find their way onto the panels, and more than one ex-convict
has appeared there in some inexplicable fashion. But to find them out
may well require a double shift of men working day and night for a month
before the case is called, and what may appear to be the most trivial
fact thus discovered may in the end prove the decisive argument for or
against accepting the juror.

Panel after panel may be exhausted before a jury in a great murder
trial has been selected, for each side in addition to its challenges
for "cause" or "bias" has thirty* peremptory ones which it may exercise
arbitrarily. If the writer's recollection is not at fault, the large
original panel drawn in the first Molineux trial was used up and
several others had to be drawn until eight hundred talesmen had been
interrogated before the jury was finally selected. It is usual to
examine at least fifty in the ordinary murder case before a jury is
secured.



     * In the State of New York.


It may seem to the reader that this scrutiny of talesmen is not strictly
preparation for the trial, but, in fact, it is fully as important
as getting ready the facts themselves; for a poor jury, either from
ignorance or prejudice, will acquit on the same facts which will lead
a sound jury to convict. A famous prosecutor used to say, "Get your
jury--the case will take care of itself."

But as the examination of the panel and the opening address come last
in point of chronology it will be well to begin at the beginning and
see what the labors of the prosecutor are in the initial stages of
preparation. Let us take, for example, some notorious case, where an
unfortunate victim has died from the effects of a poisoned pill or
draught of medicine, or has been found dead in his room with a revolver
bullet in his heart. Some time before the matter has come into the hands
of the prosecutor, the press and the police have generally been doing
more or less (usually less) effective work upon the case. The yellow
journals have evolved some theory of who is the culprit and have loosed
their respective reporters and "special criminologists" upon him. Each
has its own idea and its own methods--often unscrupulous. And each has
its own particular victim upon whom it intends to fasten the blame.
Heaven save his reputation! Many an innocent man has been ruined for
life through the efforts of a newspaper "to make a case," and, of
course, the same thing, though happily in a lesser degree, is true of
the police and of some prosecutors as well.

In every great criminal case there are always four different and
frequently antagonistic elements engaged in the work of detection and
prosecution--first, the police; second, the district attorney; third,
the press; and, lastly, the personal friends and family of the deceased
or injured party. Each for its own ends--be it professional pride,
personal glorification, hard cash, or revenge--is equally anxious to
find the evidence and establish a case. Of course, the police are the
first ones notified of the commission of a crime, but as it is now
almost universally their duty to inform at once the coroner and also
the district attorney thereof, a tripartite race for glory frequently
results which adds nothing to the dignity of the administration of
criminal justice.

The coroner is at best no more than an appendix to the legal anatomy,
and frequently he is a disease. The spectacle of a medical man of
small learning and less English trying to preside over a court of first
instance is enough to make the accused himself chuckle for joy.

Not long ago the coroners of New York discovered that, owing to the
fact that the district attorney or his representatives generally
arrived first at the scene of any crime, there was nothing left for the
"medicos" to do, for the district attorney would thereupon submit the
matter at once to the grand jury instead of going through the formality
of a hearing in the coroner's court. The legal medicine men felt
aggrieved, and determined to be such early birds that no worm should
escape them. Accordingly, the next time one of them was notified of a
homicide he raced his horse down Madison Avenue at such speed that he
collided with a trolley car and broke his leg.

Another complained to the district attorney that the assistants of the
latter, who had arrived at the scene of an asphyxiation before him, had
bungled everything.

"Ach, dose young men!" he exclaimed, wringing his hands--"Dose young
men, dey come here and dey opened der vindow and let out der gas and all
mine evidence esgaped."

It is said that this interesting personage once instructed his jury
to find that "the diseased came to his death from an ulster on the
stomach."

These anecdotes are, perhaps, what judges would call obiter dicta, yet
the coroner's court has more than once been utilized as a field in the
actual preparation of a criminal case. When Roland B. Molineux was first
suspected of having caused the death of Mrs. Adams by sending the famous
poisoned package of patent medicine to Harry Cornish through the
mails, the assistant district attorney summoned him as a witness to the
coroner's court and attempted to get from him in this way a statement
which Molineux would otherwise have refused to make.

When all the first hullabaloo is over and the accused is under arrest
and safely locked up, it is usually found that the police have merely
run down the obvious witnesses and made a prima facie case. All the
finer work remains to be done either by the district attorney himself
or by the detective bureau working under his immediate direction or
in harmony with him. Little order has been observed in the securing of
evidence. Every one is a fish who runs into the net of the police, and
all is grist that comes to their mill. The district attorney sends
for the officers who have worked upon the case and for the captain
or inspector who has directed their efforts, takes all the papers and
tabulates all their information. His practiced eye shows him at once
that a large part is valueless, much is contradictory, and all needs
careful elaboration. A winnowing process occurs then and there; and
the officers probably receive a "special detail" from headquarters and
thereafter take their orders from the prosecutor himself. The detective
bureau is called in and arrangements made for the running down of
particular clues. Then he will take off his coat, clear his desk, and
get down to work.

Of course, his first step is to get all the information he can as to the
actual facts surrounding the crime itself. He immediately subpoenas all
the witnesses, whether previously interrogated by the police or not,
who know anything about the matter, and subjects them to a rigorous
cross-examination. Then he sends for the police themselves and
cross-examines them. If it appears that any witnesses have disappeared
he instructs his detectives how and where to look for them. Often this
becomes in the end the most important element in the preparation for
the trial. Thus in the Nan Patterson case the search for and ultimate
discovery of Mr. and Mrs. Morgan Smith (the sister and brother-in-law of
the accused) was one of its most dramatic features. After they had been
found it was necessary to indict and then to extradite them in order
to secure their presence within the jurisdiction, and when all this had
been accomplished it proved practically valueless.

It frequently happens that an entire case will rest upon the testimony
of a single witness whose absence from the jurisdiction would prevent
the trial. An instance of such a case was that of Albert T. Patrick, for
without the testimony of his alleged accomplice--the valet, Jones--he
could not have been convicted of murder. The preservation of such a
witness and his testimony thus becomes of paramount importance, and
rascally witnesses sometimes enjoy considerable ease, if not luxury, at
the expense of the public while waiting to testify. Often, too, a case
of great interest will arise where the question of the guilt of the
accused turns upon the evidence of some one person who, either from
mercenary motives or because of "blood and affection," is unwilling
to come to the fore and tell the truth. A striking case of this sort
occurred some ten years ago. The "black sheep" of a prominent New York
family forged the name of his sister to a draft for thirty thousand
dollars. This sister, who was an elderly woman of the highest character
and refinement, did not care to pocket the loss herself and declined to
have the draft debited to her account at the bank. A lawsuit followed,
in which the sister swore that the name signed to the draft was not in
her handwriting. She won her case, but some officious person laid the
matter before the district attorney. The forger was arrested and
his sister was summoned before the grand jury. Here was a pleasant
predicament. If she testified for the State her brother would
undoubtedly go to prison for many years, to say nothing of the notoriety
for the entire family which so sensational a case would occasion. She,
therefore, slipped out of the city and sailed for Europe the night
before she was to appear before the grand jury. Her brother was in due
course indicted and held for trial in large bail, but there was and
is no prospect of convicting him for his crime so long as his sister
remains in the voluntary exile to which she has subjected herself. She
can never return to New York to live unless something happens either to
the indictment or her brother, neither of which events seems likely in
the immediate future.

Perhaps, if the case is one of shooting, the weapon has vanished. Its
discovery may lead to the finding of the murderer. In one instance where
a body was found in the woods with a bullet through the heart, there was
nothing to indicate who had committed the crime. The only scintilla of
evidence was an exploded cartridge--a small thing on which to build
a case. But the district attorney had the hammer marks upon the cap
magnified several hundred times and then set out to find the rifle which
bore the hammer which had made them. Thousands of rifles all over the
State were examined. At last in a remote lumber camp was found the
weapon which had fired the fatal bullet. The owner was arrested, accused
of the murder, and confessed his crime. In like manner, if it becomes
necessary to determine where a typewritten document was prepared the
letters may be magnified, and by examining the ribbons of suspected
machines the desired fact may be ascertained. The magnifying glass still
plays an important part in detecting crime, although usually in ways
little suspected by the general public.

On the other hand, where the weapon has not been spirited away the
detectives may spend weeks in discovering when and where it was
purchased. Every pawnshop, every store where a pistol could be bought,
is investigated, and under proper circumstances the requisite evidence
to show deliberation and premeditation may be secured.

These investigations are naturally conducted at the very outset of the
preparation of the case.

The weapon, in seven trials out of ten, is the most important thing in
it. By its means it can generally be demonstrated whether the shooting
was accidental or intentional--and whether or not the killing was in
self-defence.

Where this last plea is interposed it is usually made at once upon the
arrest, the accused explaining to the police that he fired only to
save his own life. In such a situation, where the killing is admitted,
practically the entire preparation will centre upon the most minute
tests to determine whether or not the shot was fired as the accused
claims that it was. The writer can recall at least a dozen cases in his
own experience where the story of the defendant, that the revolver was
discharged in a hand-to-hand struggle, was conclusively disproved by
experimenting with the weapon before the trial. There was one homicide
in which a bullet perforated a felt cap and penetrated the forehead of
the deceased. The defendant asserted that he was within three feet of
his victim when he fired, and that the other was about to strike him
with a bludgeon. A quantity of felt, of weight similar to that of
the cap, was procured and the revolver discharged at it from varying
distances. A microscopic examination showed that certain discolorations
around the bullet-hole (claimed by the defence to be burns made by the
powder) were, in fact, grease marks, and that the shot must have been
fired from a distance of about fifteen feet. The defendant was convicted
on his own story, supplemented by the evidence of the witness who made
the tests.

The most obvious and first requirement is, as has been said, to find
the direct witnesses to the facts surrounding the crime, commit their
statements under oath to writing, so that they cannot later be denied
or evaded, and make sure that these witnesses will not only hold no
intercourse with the other side, but will be on hand when wanted. This
last is not always an easy task, and various expedients often have to
be resorted to, such as placing hostile witnesses under police
surveillance, or in some cases in "houses of detention," and hiding
others in out-of-the-way places, or supplying them with a bodyguard if
violence is to be anticipated. When the proper time comes the favorable
witnesses must be duly drilled or coached, which does not imply anything
improper, but means merely that they must be instructed how to deliver
their testimony, what answers are expected to certain questions, and
what facts it is intended to elicit from them. Witnesses are often
offended and run amuck because they are not given a chance upon the
stand to tell the story of their lives. This must be guarded against and
steps taken to have their statements given in such a way that they are
audible and intelligible. A few lessons in elementary elocution are
generally vitally necessary. The man with the bassoon voice must be
tamed, and the birdlike old lady made to chirp more loudly. But all this
is the self-evident preparation which must take place in every case, and
while highly important is of far less interest than the development
of the circumstantial evidence which is the next consideration of the
district attorney.

The discovery and proper proof of minute facts which tend to demonstrate
the guilt of an accused are the joy of the natural prosecutor, and he
may in his enthusiasm spend many thousands of dollars on what seems, and
often is, an immaterial matter. Youthful officials intrusted with the
preparation of important cases often become unduly excited and forget
that the taxpayers are paying the bills. The writer remembers sitting
beside one of these enthusiasts during a celebrated trial. A certain
woman witness had incidentally testified to a remote meeting with
the deceased at which a certain other woman was alleged to have been
present. The matter did not seem of much interest or importance, but
the youth in question seized a yellow pad and excitedly wrote in blue
pencil, "Find Birdie" (the other lady) "at any cost!" This he handed
to a detective, who hastened importantly away. It is to be hoped that
"Birdie" was found speedily and in an inexpensive manner.

When the case against Albert T. Patrick, later convicted of the murder
of the aged William M. Rice, was in course of preparation, it was found
desirable to show that Patrick had called up his accomplice on the
telephone upon the night of the murder. Accordingly, the telephone
company was compelled to examine several hundred thousand telephone
slips to determine whether or not this had actually occurred. While the
fact was established in the affirmative, the company now destroys its
slips in order not to have to repeat the performance a second time.

Likewise, in the preparation of the Molineux case it became important
to demonstrate that the accused had sent a letter under an assumed name
ordering certain remedies. As a result, one of the employees of the
patent-medicine company spent several months going over their old mail
orders and comparing them with a certain sample, until at last the
letter was unearthed. Of course, the district attorney had to pay for
it, and it was probably worth what it cost to the prosecution, although
Molineux's conviction was reversed by the Court of Appeals and he was
acquitted upon his second trial.

The danger is, however, that a prosecutor who has an unlimited amount
of money at his disposal may be led into expenditures which are hardly
justified simply because he thinks they may help to secure a conviction.
Nothing is easier than to waste money in this fashion, and public
officials sometimes spend the county's money with considerably more
freedom than they would their own under similar circumstances.

The legitimate expenses connected with the preparation of every
important case are naturally large. For example, diagrams must be
prepared, photographs taken of the place of the crime, witnesses
compensated for their time and their expenses paid, and, most important
of all, competent experts must be engaged. This leads us to an
interesting aspect of the modern jury trial.

When no other defence to homicide is possible the claim of insanity is
frequently interposed. Nothing is more confusing to the ordinary juryman
than trying to determine the probative value of evidence touching
unsoundness of mind, and the application thereto of the legal test
of criminal responsibility. In point of fact, juries are hardly to be
blamed for this, since the law itself is antiquated and the subject one
abounding in difficulty. Unfortunately the opportunity for vague yet
damaging testimony on the part of experts, the ease with which
any desired opinion can be defended by a slight alteration in the
hypothetical facts, and the practical impossibility of exposure,
have been seized upon with avidity by a score or more of unscrupulous
alienists who are prepared to sell their services to the highest bidder.
These men are all the more dangerous because, clever students of mental
disease and thorough masters of their subject as they are, they are able
by adroit qualifications and skilful evasions to make half-truths seem
as convincing as whole ones. They ask and receive large sums for their
services, and their dishonest testimony must be met and refuted by the
evidence of honest physicians, who, by virtue of their attainments, have
a right to demand substantial fees. Even so, newspaper reports of the
expense to the State of notorious trials are grossly exaggerated.
The entire cost of the first Thaw trial to the County of New York was
considerably less than twenty thousand dollars, and the second trial
not more than half that amount. To the defence, however, it was a costly
matter, as the recent schedules in bankruptcy of the defendant show.
Therein it appears that one of his half-dozen counsel still claims
as owing to him for his services on the first trial the modest sum of
thirty-five thousand dollars. The cost of the whole defence was probably
ten times that sum. Most of the money goes to the lawyers, and the
experts take the remainder.

It goes without saying that both prosecutor and attorney for the defence
must be masters of the subject involved. A trial for poisoning means
an exhaustive study not only of analytic chemistry, but of practical
medicine on the part of all the lawyers in the case, while a plea of
insanity requires that, for the time being, the district attorney shall
become an alienist, familiar with every aspect of paranoia, dementia
praecox, and all other forms of mania. He must also reduce his knowledge
to concrete, workable form, and be able to defeat opposing experts
on their own ground. But such knowledge comes only by prayer and
fasting--or, perhaps, rather by months of hard and remorseless grind.

The writer once prosecuted a druggist who had, by mistake, filled
a prescription for a one-fourth-grain pill of calomel with a
one-fourth-grain pill of morphine. The baby for whom the pill was
intended died in consequence. The defence was that the prescription
had been properly filled, but that the child was the victim of various
diseases, from acute gastritis to cerebro-spinal meningitis. In
preparation the writer was compelled to spend four hours every evening
for a week with three specialists, and became temporarily a minor expert
on children's diseases. To-day he is forced to admit that he would not
know a case of acute gastritis from one of mumps. But the druggist was
convicted.

Yet it is not enough to prepare for the defence you believe the accused
is going to interpose. A conscientious preparation means getting ready
for any defence he may endeavor to put in. Just as the prudent general
has an eye to every possible turn of the battle and has, if he can,
re-enforcements on the march, so the prosecutor must be ready for
anything, and readiest of all for the unexpected. He must not rest upon
the belief that the other side will concede any fact, however clear
it may seem. Some cases are lost simply because it never occurs to the
district attorney that the accused will deny something which the State
has twenty witnesses to prove. The twenty witnesses are, therefore, not
summoned on the day of trial, the defendant does deny it, and as it is a
case of word against word the accused gets the benefit of the doubt and,
perhaps, is acquitted.

No case is properly prepared unless there is in the court-room every
witness who knows anything about any aspect of the case. No one can
foretell when the unimportant will become the vital. Most cases turn
on an unconsidered point. A prosecutor once lost what seemed to him the
clearest sort of a case. When it was all over, and the defendant had
passed out of the courtroom rejoicing, he turned to the foreman and
asked the reason for the verdict.

"Did you hear your chief witness say he was a carpenter?" inquired the
foreman.

"Why, certainly," answered the district attorney,

"Did you hear me ask him what he paid for that ready-made pine door he
claimed to be working on when he saw the assault?"

The prosecutor recalled the incident and nodded.

"Well, he said ten dollars--and I knew he was a liar. A door like that
don't cost but four-fifty!"

It is, perhaps, too much to require a knowledge of carpentry on the part
of a lawyer trying an assault case. Yet the juror was undoubtedly right
in his deduction.

In a case where insanity is the defence, the State must dig up and have
at hand every person it can find who knew the accused at any period of
his career. He will probably claim that in his youth he was kicked in
a game of foot-ball and fractured his skull, that later he fell into an
elevator shaft and had concussion of the brain, or that he was hit on
the head by a burglar. It is usually difficult, if not impossible, to
disprove such assertions, but the prosecutor must be ready, if he can,
to show that foot-ball was not invented until after the defendant had
attained maturity, that it was some other man who fell down the elevator
shaft, and to produce the burglar to deny that the assault occurred.
Naturally, complete preparation for an important trial demands the
presence of many witnesses who ultimately are not needed and who are
never called. Probably in most such cases about half the witnesses
do not testify at all. Most of what has been said relates to the
preparation for trial of cases where the accused is already under arrest
when the district attorney is called into the case. If this stage has
not been reached the prosecutor may well be called upon to exercise some
of the functions of a detective in the first instance.

A few years ago it was brought to the attention of the New York
authorities that many blackmailing letters were being received bearing
the name of "Lewis Jarvis." These were of a character to render the
apprehension of the writer of them a matter of much importance. The
letters directed that the replies be sent to a certain box in the New
York post-office, but as the boxes are numerous and close together it
seemed doubtful if "Lewis Jarvis" could be detected when he called
for his mail. The district attorney, the police, and the post-office
officials finally evolved the scheme of plugging the lock of "Lewis
Jarvis's" box with a match. The scheme worked, for "Jarvis," finding
that he could not use his key, went to the delivery window and asked for
his mail. The very instant the letters reached his hand the gyves were
upon the wrists of one of the best-known attorneys in the city.

When the district attorney has been apprised that a crime has been
committed, and that a certain person is the guilty party, he not
infrequently allows the suspect to go his way under the careful watch
of detectives, and thus often secures much new evidence against him. In
this way it is sometimes established that the accused has endeavored
to bribe the witnesses and to induce them to leave the State, while
the whereabouts of stolen loot is often discovered. In most instances,
however, the district attorney begins where the police leave off, and
he merely supplements their labors and prepares for the actual trial
itself. But the press he has always with him, and from the first moment
after the crime up to the execution of the sentence or the liberation of
the accused, the reporters dog his footsteps, sit on his doorstep, and
deluge him with advice and information.

Now a curious feature about the evidence "worked up" by reporters for
their papers is that little of it materializes when the prosecutor
wishes to make use of it. Of course, some reporters do excellent
detective work, and there are one or two veterans attached to the
criminal courts in New York City who, in addition to their literary
capacities, are natural-born sleuths, and combine with a knowledge of
criminal law, almost as extensive as that of a regular prosecutor, a
resourcefulness and nerve that often win the case for whichever side
they espouse. I have frequently found that these men knew more about the
cases which I was prosecuting than I did myself, and a tip from them has
more than once turned defeat into victory. But newspaper men, for one
reason or another, are loath to testify, and usually make but poor
witnesses. They feel that their motives will be questioned, and are
naturally unwilling to put themselves in an equivocal position.
The writer well remembers that in the Mabel Parker case, where the
defendant, a young and pretty woman, had boasted of her forgeries before
a roomful of reporters, it was impossible, when her trial was called, to
find more than one of them who would testify--and he had practically to
be dragged to the witness chair. In point of fact, if reporters made a
practice of being witnesses it would probably hurt their business. But,
however much "faked" news may be published, a prosecutor who did not
listen to all the hints the press boys had to give would make a great
mistake; and as allies and advisers they are often invaluable, for they
can tell him where and how to get evidence of which otherwise he would
never hear.

The week before a great case is called is a busy one for the prosecutor
in charge. He is at his office early to interview his main witnesses and
go over their testimony with them so that their regular daily work
may not be interrupted more than shall be actually necessary. Some he
cautions against being overenthusiastic and others he encourages to
greater emphasis. The bashful "cop" is badgered until at last he ceases
to begin his testimony in the cut-and-dried police fashion.

"On the morning of the twenty-second of July, about 3.30 A.M., while on
post at the corner of Desbrosses Street--," he starts.

"Oh, quit that!" shouts the district attorney. "Tell me what you saw in
your own words."

The "cop" blushes and stammers:

"Aw, well, on the morning of the twenty-second of July, about 3.30 A.M."

"Look here!" yells the prosecutor, jumping to his feet and shaking his
fist at him, "do you want to be taken for a d--n liar? 'Morning of
the twenty-second of July, about 3.30 A.M., while on post I' You never
talked like that in your life."

By this time the "cop" is "mad clear through."

"I'm no liar!" he retorts. "I saw the ------ pull his gun and shoot!"

"Well, why didn't you say so?" laughs the prosecutor, and the officer
mollified with a cigar, dimly perceives the objectionable feature of his
testimony.

About this time one of the sleuths comes in to report that certain
much-desired witnesses have been "located" and are in custody
downstairs. The assistant makes immediate preparation for taking their
statements. Then one of the experts comes in for a chat about a new
phase of the case occasioned by the discovery that the defendant
actually did have spasms when an infant. The assistant wisely makes an
appointment for the evening. A telegram arrives saying that a witness
for the defence has just started for New York from Philadelphia and
should be duly watched on arrival. The district attorney sends for the
assistant to inquire if he has looked up the law on similar cases in
Texas and Alabama--which he probably has not done; and a friend on the
telephone informs him that Tomkins, who has been drawn on the jury, is
a boon companion of the prisoner and was accustomed to play bridge with
him every Sunday night before the murder.

Coincidently, some private detectives enter with a long report on the
various members of the panel, including the aforesaid Tomkins, whom they
pronounce to be "all right," and as never having, to their knowledge,
laid eyes on the accused. Finally, in despair, the prosecutor locks
himself in his library with a copy of the Bible, "Bartlett's Familiar
Quotations," and a volume of celebrated speeches, to prepare his summing
up, for no careful trial lawyer opens a case without first having
prepared, to some extent, at least, his closing address to the jury. He
has thought about this for weeks and perhaps for months. In his dreams
he has formulated syllogisms and delivered them to imaginary yet
obstinate talesman. He has glanced through many volumes for similes and
quotations of pertinency. He has tried various arguments on his friends
until he knows just how, if he succeeds in proving certain facts and
the defence expected is interposed, he is going to convince the twelve
jurors that the defendant is guilty and, perhaps, win an everlasting
reputation as an orator himself.

This superficial sketch of how an important criminal case is got
ready for trial would be incomplete without some further reference to
something which has been briefly hinted at before--preparation upon its
purely legal aspect. This may well demand almost as much labor as
that required in amassing the evidence. Yet a careful and painstaking
investigation of the law governing every aspect of the case is
indispensable to success. The prosecutor with a perfectly clear case may
see the defendant walk out of court a free man, simply because he has
neglected to acquaint himself with the various points of law which may
arise in the course of the trial, and the lawyer for an accused may
find his client convicted upon a charge to which he has a perfectly good
legal defence, for the same reason.

Looking at it from the point of view of the prisoner's counsel, it is
obvious that it is quite as efficacious to free your client on a point
of law, without having the case go to the jury at all, as to secure an
acquittal at their hands.

At the conclusion of the evidence introduced in behalf of the State
there is always a motion made to dismiss the case on the ground of
alleged insufficiency in the proof. This has usually been made the
subject of the most exhaustive study by the lawyers for the defence,
and requires equal preparation on the part of the prosecutor. The writer
recalls trying a bankrupt, charged with fraud, where the lawyer for
the defendant had written a brief of some three hundred pages upon the
points of law which he proposed to argue to the court upon his motion to
acquit. But, unfortunately, his client pleaded guilty and the volume was
never brought into play.

But a mastery of the law, a thorough knowledge and control of the
evidence, a careful preparation for the opening and closing addresses,
and an intimate acquaintance with the panel from which the jury is to be
drawn are by no means the only elements in the preparation for a
great legal battle. One thing still remains, quite as important as the
rest--the selection of the best time and the best court for the trial.
"A good beginning" in a criminal case means a beginning before the right
judge, the proper jury, and at a time when that vague but important
influence known as public opinion augurs success. A clever criminal
lawyer, be he prosecutor or lawyer for the defendant, knows that all the
preparation in the world is of no account provided his case is to come
before a stupid or biased judge, or a prejudiced or obstinate jury.
Therefore, each side, in a legal battle of importance, studies, as well
as it can, the character, connections, and cast of mind of the different
judges who may be called upon to hear the case, and, like a jockey
at the flag, tries to hurry or delay, as the case may be, until the
judicial auspices appear most favorable. A lawyer who has a weak defence
seeks to bring the case before a weak judge, or, if public clamor is
loud against his client, makes use of every technical artifice to secure
delay, by claiming that there are flaws in the indictment, or by moving
for commissions to take testimony in distant points of the country.
The opportunities for legal procrastination are so numerous that in a
complicated case the defence may often delay matters for over a year.
This may be an important factor in the final result.

Yet even this is not enough, for, ultimately, it is the judge's charge
to the jury which is going to guide their deliberations and, in
large measure, determine their verdict. The lawyers for the defence,
therefore, prepare long statements of what they either believe or
pretend to believe to be the law. These statements embrace all the legal
propositions, good or bad, favorable to their side of the case. If
they can induce the judge to follow these so much the better for their
client, for even if they are not law it makes no difference, since the
State has no appeal from an acquittal in a criminal case, no matter how
much the judge has erred. In the same way, but not in quite the same
fashion, the district attorney prepares "requests to charge," but his
desire for favorable instructions should be, and generally is, curbed by
the consideration that if the judge makes any mistake in the law and the
defendant is convicted he can appeal and upset the case. Of course, some
prosecutors are so anxious to convict that they will wheedle or deceive
a judge into giving charges which are not only most inimical to the
prisoner, but so utterly unsound that a reversal is sure to follow; but
when one of these professional bloodhounds is baying upon the trail all
he thinks of is a conviction--that is all he wants, all the public
will remember; to him will be the glory; and when the case is finally
reversed he will probably be out of office. These "requests" cover
pages, and touch upon every phase of law applicable or inapplicable to
the case. Frequently they number as many as fifty, sometimes many more.
It is "up to" the judge to decide "off the bat" which are right and
which are wrong. If he guesses that the right one is wrong or the wrong
one right the defendant gets a new trial.




CHAPTER III. Sensationalism and Jury Trials


For the past twenty-five years we have heard the cry upon all sides
that the jury system is a failure, and to this general indictment is
frequently added the specification that the trials in our higher
courts of criminal justice are the scenes of grotesque buffoonery and
merriment, where cynical juries recklessly disregard their oaths and
where morbid crowds flock to satisfy the cravings of their imaginations
for details of blood and sexuality.

It is unnecessary to question the honesty of those who thus picture the
administration of criminal justice in America. Indeed, thus it probably
appears to them. But before such an arraignment of present conditions
in a highly civilized and progressive nation is accepted as final, it is
well to examine into its inherent probabilities and test it by what we
know of the actual facts.

In the first place, it should be remembered that the jury was instituted
and designed to protect the English freeman from tyranny upon the part
of the crown. Judges were, and sometimes still are, the creatures of a
ruler or unduly subject to his influence. And that ruler neither was,
nor is, always the head of the nation; but just as in the days of the
Normans he might have been a powerful earl whose influence could make or
unmake a judge, so to-day he may be none the less a ruler if he exists
in the person of a political boss who has created the judge before whom
his political enemy is to be tried. The writer has seen more than one
judge openly striving to influence a jury to convict or to acquit a
prisoner at the dictation of such a boss, who, not content to issue his
commands from behind the arras, came to the courtroom and ascended
the bench to see that they were obeyed. Usually the jury indignantly
resented such interference and administered a well-merited rebuke by
acting directly contrary to the clearly indicated wishes of the judge.

But while admitting its theoretic value as a bulwark of liberty,
the modern assailant of the jury brushes the consideration aside by
asserting that the system has "broken down" and "degenerated into a
farce."

Let us now see how much of a farce it is. If four times out of five
a judge rendered decisions that met with general approval, he would
probably be accounted a highly satisfactory judge. Now, out of every
one hundred indicted prisoners brought to the bar for trial, probably
fifteen ought to be acquitted if prosecuted impartially and in
accordance with the strict rules of evidence. In the year 1910 the
juries of New York County convicted in sixty-six per cent of the cases
before them. If we are to test fairly the efficiency of the system,
we must deduct from the thirty-four acquittals remaining the fifteen
acquittals which were justifiable. By so doing we shall find that in
the year 1910 the New York County juries did the correct thing in about
eighty-one cases out of every hundred. This is a high percentage of
efficiency.* Is it likely that any judge would have done much better?


     * The following table gives the yearly percentages of
     convictions and acquittals by verdict in New York County since
     1901:

                NUMBER        NUMBER
     YEAR     CONVICTIONS   ACQUITTALS  CONVICTIONS   ACQUITTALS
               BY VERDICT   BY VERDICT   PER CENT      PER CENT

     1901........551...........344..........62............38
     1902........419...........349..........55............45
     1903........485...........307..........61............39
     1904........495...........357..........58............42
     1905........489...........299..........62............38
     1906........464...........246..........65............35
     1907........582...........264..........68............32
     1908........649...........301..........62............38
     1909........463...........235..........66............34
     1910........649...........325..........66............34


After a rather long experience as a prosecutor, in which he conducted
many hundreds of criminal cases, the writer believes that the ordinary
New York City jury finds a correct general verdict four times out of
five. As to talesmen in other localities he has no knowledge or reliable
information. It seems hardly possible, however, that juries in
other parts of the United States could be more heterogeneous or less
intelligent than those before which he formed his conclusions. Of
course, jury judgments are sometimes flagrantly wrong. But there are
many verdicts popularly regarded as examples of lawlessness which, if
examined calmly and solely from the point of view of the evidence, would
be found to be the reasonable acts of honest and intelligent juries.

For example, the acquittal of Thaw upon the ground of insanity is
usually spoken of as an illustration of sentimentality on the part of
jurymen, and of their willingness to be swayed by their emotions where
a woman is involved. But few clearer cases of insanity have been
established in a court of justice. The district attorney's own experts
had pronounced the defendant a hopeless paranoiac; the prosecutor had,
at a previous trial, openly declared the same to be his own opinion; and
the evidence was convincing. At the time it was rendered, the verdict
was accepted as a foregone conclusion. To-day the case is commonly
cited as proof of the gullibility of juries and of the impossibility of
convicting a rich man of a crime.

There will always be some persons who think that every defendant should
be convicted and feel aggrieved if he is turned out by the jury. Yet
they entirely forget, in their displeasure at the acquittal of a man
whom they instinctively "know" to be guilty, that the jury probably
had exactly the same impression, but were obliged under their oaths to
acquit because of an insufficiency of evidence.

An excellent illustration of such a case is that of Nan Patterson. She
is commonly supposed to have attended, upon the night of her acquittal,
a banquet at which one of her lawyers toasted her as "the guilty girl
who beat the case." Whether she was guilty or not, there is a general
impression that she murdered Caesar Young. Yet the writer, who was
present throughout the trial, felt at the conclusion of the case that
there was a fairly reasonable doubt of her guilt. Even so, the jury
disagreed, although the case is usually referred to as an acquittal and
a monument to the sentimentality of juries.

The acquittal of Roland B. Molineux is also recalled as a case where a
man, previously proved guilty, managed to escape. The writer, who
was then an assistant district attorney, made a careful study of the
evidence at the time, and feels confident that the great majority of the
legal profession would agree with him in the opinion that the Court of
Appeals had no choice but to reverse the defendant's first conviction on
account of the most prejudicial error committed at the trial, and that
the jury who acquitted him upon the second occasion had equally no
choice when the case was presented with a proper regard to the rules of
evidence and procedure. Indeed, on the second trial the evidence pointed
almost as convincingly toward another person as toward the defendant.

I have mentioned the Patterson, Thaw, and Molineux trials because they
are cases commonly referred to in support of the general contention
that the jury system is a failure. But I am inclined to believe that
any single judge, bench of judges, or board of commissioners would have
reached the same result as the juries did in these instances.

It is quite true that juries, for rather obvious reasons, are more apt
to acquit in murder cases than in others. In the first place, save where
the defendant obviously belongs to the vicious criminal class, a jury
finds it somewhat difficult to believe, unless overwhelming motive be
shown, that he could have deliberately taken another's life. Thus, with
sound reason, they give great weight to the plea of self-defence which
the accused urges upon them. He is generally the only witness. His story
has to be disproved by circumstantial evidence, if indeed there be any.
Frequently it stands alone as the only account of the homicide. Thus
murder cases are almost always weaker than others, since the chief
witness has been removed by death; while at the same time the nature of
the punishment leads the jury unconsciously to require a higher degree
of proof than in cases where the consequences are less abhorrent. All
this is quite natural and inevitable. Moreover, homicide cases as a rule
are better defended than others, a fact which undoubtedly affects the
result. These considerations apply to all trials for homicide, notorious
or otherwise, the results of which in New York County for ten years are
set forth in the following table:

     YEAR     CONVICTIONS   ACQUITTALS  CONVICTIONS   ACQUITTALS
                                         PER CENT      PER CENT
     1901.........25............17..........60............40
     1902.........31............11..........74............26
     1903.........42.............8..........84............16
     1904.........37............14..........72............28
     1905.........32............13..........71............29
     1906.........53............22..........70............30
     1907.........39............10..........78............22
     1908.........35............17..........67............33
     1909.........43............11..........80............20
     1910.........45............15..........75............25
     TOTAL.......382...........138......Av. 74........Av. 27


A popular impression exists at the present time that a man convicted of
murder has but to appeal his case on some technical ground in order to
secure a reversal, and thus escape the consequences of his crime. How
wide of the mark such a belief may be, at least so far as one locality
is concerned, is shown by the fact that in New York State, from 1887 to
1907, there were 169 decisions by the Court of Appeals on appeals from
convictions of murder in the first degree, out of which there were only
twenty-nine reversals. Seven of these defendants were again immediately
tried and convicted, and a second time appealed, upon which occasion
only two were successful, while five had their convictions promptly
affirmed. Thus, so far as the ultimate triumph of justice is concerned,
out of 169 cases in that period the appellants finally succeeded in
twenty-two only.

Since 1902 there have been twenty-seven decisions rendered in
first-degree murder cases by the Court of Appeals, with only three
reversals.* (* Written in 1909.) The more important convictions
throughout the State are affirmed with great regularity.

As to the conduct of such cases, the writer's own experience is that
a murder trial is the most solemn proceeding known to the law. He has
prosecuted at least fifty men for murder, and convicted more than he
cares to remember. Such trials are invariably dignified and deliberate
so far as the conduct of the legal side of the case is concerned.
No judge, however unqualified for the bench; no prosecutor, however
light-minded; no lawyer however callous, fails to feel the serious
nature of the transaction or to be affected strongly by the fact that
he is dealing with life, and death. A prosecutor who openly laughed
or sneered at a prisoner charged with murder would severely injure his
cause. The jury, naturally, are overwhelmed with the gravity of the
occasion and the responsibility resting upon them.

In the Patterson, Thaw, and Molineux cases the evidence, unfortunately,
dealt with unpleasant subjects and at times was revolting, but there was
a quiet propriety in the way in which the witnesses were examined
that rendered it as inoffensive as it could possibly be. Outside the
court-room the vulgar crowd may have spat and sworn; and inside no doubt
there were degenerate men and women who eagerly strained their ears to
catch every item of depravity. But the throngs that filled the courtroom
were quiet and well ordered, and the justified interested outnumbered
the morbid.

The writer deprecates the impulse which leads judges, from a feeling
that justice should be publicly administered, to throw wide the doors
of every courtroom, irrespective of the subject-matter of the trial. We
need have no fear of Star Chamber proceedings in America, and no harm
would be done by excluding from the courtroom all persons who have no
business there.

It is, of course, not unnatural that in the course of a trial occupying
weeks or months the tension should occasionally be relieved by a gleam
of humor. After one has been busy trying a case for a couple of weeks
one goes to court and sets to work in much the same frame of mind in
which one would attack any other business. But the fact that a small
boy sometimes sees something funny at a funeral, or a bevy of giggling
shop-girls may be sitting in the gallery at a fashionable wedding,
argues little in respect to the solemnity or beauty of the service
itself.

What are the celebrated cases--the trials that attract the attention
and interest of the public? In the first place, they are the very cases
which contain those elements most likely to arouse the sympathy and
prejudices of a jury--where a girl has taken the life of her supposed
seducer, or a husband has avenged his wife's alleged dishonor. Such
cases arouse the public imagination for the very reason that every
man realizes that there are two sides to every genuine tragedy of
this character--the legal and the natural. Thus, aside from any other
consideration, they are the obvious instances where justice is most
likely to go astray.

In the next place, the defence is usually in the hands of counsel of
adroitness and ability; for even if the prisoner has no money to pay his
lawyer, the latter is willing to take the case for the advertising he
will get out of it.

Third, a trial which lasts for a long time naturally results in creating
in the jury's mind an exaggerated idea of the prisoner's rights, namely,
the presumption of innocence and the benefit of the reasonable doubt.
For every time that the jury will hear these phrases once in a petty
larceny or forgery case, they will hear them in a lengthy murder trial
a hundred times. They see the defendant day after day, and the relation
becomes more personal. Their responsibility seems greater toward him
than toward the defendant in petty cases.

Last, as previously suggested, murder cases are apt to be inherently
weaker than others, and more often depend upon circumstantial evidence.

The results of such cases are therefore an inadequate test of the
efficiency of a jury system. They are, in fact, the precise cases where,
if at all, the jury might be expected to go wrong.

But juries would go astray far less frequently even in such trials were
it not for that most vicious factor in the administration of criminal
justice--the "yellow" journal. For the impression that public trials
are the scenes of buffoonery and brutality is due to the manner in which
these trials are exploited by the sensational papers.

The instant that a sensational homicide occurs, the aim of the editors
of these papers is--not to see that a swift and sure retribution is
visited upon the guilty, or that a prompt and unqualified vindication is
accorded to the innocent, but, on the contrary, so to handle the matter
that as many highly colored "stories" as possible can be run about it.

Thus, where the case is perfectly clear against the prisoner, the
"yellow" press seeks to bolster up the defence and really to justify
the killing by a thinly disguised appeal to the readers' passions. Not
infrequently, while the editorial page is mourning the prevalence of
homicide, the front columns are bristling with sensational accounts of
the home-coming of the injured husband, the heartbreaking confession of
the weak and erring wife, and the sneering nonchalance of the seducer,
until a public sentiment is created which, if it outwardly deprecates
the invocation of the unwritten law, secretly avows that it would have
done the same thing in the prisoner's place.

This antecedent public sentiment is fostered from day to day until it
has unconsciously permeated every corner of the community. The juryman
will swear that he is unaffected by what he has read, but unknown to
himself there are already tiny furrows in his brain along which the
appeal of the defence will run.

In view of this deliberate perversion of truth and morals, the
euphemisms of a hard-put defendant's counsel when he pictures a chorus
girl as an angel and a coarse bounder as a St. George seem innocent
indeed. It is not within the rail of the courtroom but within the pages
of these sensational journals that justice is made a farce. The phrase
"contempt of court" has ceased practically to have any significance
whatever. The front pages teem with caricatures of the judge upon the
bench, of the individual jurors with exaggerated heads upon impossible
bodies, of the lawyers ranting and bellowing, juxtaposed with sketches
of the defendant praying beside his prison cot or firing the fatal shot
in obedience to a message borne by an angel from on high.

How long would the "unwritten law" play any part in the administration
of criminal justice if every paper in the land united in demanding, not
only in its editorials, but upon its front pages, that private vengeance
must cease? Let the "yellow" newspapers confine themselves simply to
an accurate report of the evidence at the trial, with a reiterated
insistence that the law must take its course. Let them stop pandering
to those morbid tastes which they have themselves created. Let the
"Sympathy Sisters," the photographer, and the special artist be excluded
from the court-room. When these things are done, we shall have the same
high standard of efficiency upon the part of the jury in great murder
trials that we have in other cases.



CHAPTER IV. Why Do Men Kill?


When a shrewd but genial editor called me up on the telephone and asked
me how I should like to write an article on the above lurid title, I
laughed in his--I mean the telephone's face.

"My dear fellow!" I said (I should only have the nerve to call him that
over a wire). "It would ruin me! How could I keep my self-respect and
write that kind of sensational stuff--Why do men kill? Why do men eat?
Why do men drink? Why do men love? Why do men--"

"Look here!" he interrupted. "I want to know why one man kills another
man. If we knew why, maybe we could stop it, couldn't we? We could try
to, anyhow. And you know something about it. You've prosecuted nearly
a hundred men for murder. Get the facts--that's what I want. Cut
the adjectives and morality, and get down to the reasons. Anything
particularly undignified about that?" And he rang off.

I arose and walked over to the bookcase on which reposed several
shelves of "minutes" of criminal trials. They were dusty and depressing.
Practically every one of them was a memento of some poor devil gone to
prison or to the chair. Where were they now--and why did they kill--yes,
why DID they?

I glanced along the red-labeled backs.

"People versus Candido." Now why did HE kill? I remembered the Italian
perfectly. He killed his friend because the latter had been too
attentive to his wife. "People versus Higgins." Why did he? That was
a drunken row on a New Year's Eve within the sound of Trinity chimes.
"People versus Sterling Greene." Yes, he was a colored man--I recalled
the evidence--drink and a "yellow gal." "People versus Mock Duck"-a
Chinese feud between the On Leong Tong and the Hip Sing Tong--a
vendetta, first one Chink shot and then another, turn and turn about,
running back through Mott Street, New York, Boston, San Francisco, until
the origin of the quarrel was lost in the dim Celestial mists across
the sea. Out of the first four cases the following motives: Jealousy--1.
Drink--1. Drink and jealousy--1. Scattering (how can you term a "Tong"
row?)--1.

I began to get interested. Supposing I dug out all the homicide cases I
had ever tried, what would the result show as to motive for the killing?
Would drink and women account for seventy-five per cent? Mentally I ran
my eye back over nearly ten years. What OTHER motives had the defendants
at the bar had? There was Laudiero--an Italian "Camorrista"--he had
killed simply for the distinction it gave him among his countrymen
and the satisfaction he felt at being known as a "bad" man--a "capo
maestra." There was Joseph Ferrone--pure jealousy again. Hendry--animal
hate intensified by drink. Yoscow--a deliberate murder, planned in
advance by several of a gang, to get rid of a young bully who had made
himself generally unpleasant. There was Childs, who had killed, as he
claimed, in self-defence because he was set upon and assaulted by rival
runners from another seaman's boarding house. Really it began to look as
if men killed for a lot of reasons.

One consideration at once suggested itself. How about the killings where
the murderer is never caught? The prisoners tried for murder are only a
mere fraction of those who commit murder. True, and the more deliberate
the murder, the greater, unfortunately, the chance of the villain
getting away. Still, in cases merely of suspected murder, or in cases
where no evidence is taken, it would be manifestly unfair arbitrarily to
assign motives for the deed, if deed it was. No, one must start with the
assumption, sufficiently accurate under all the circumstances, that
the killings in which the killer is caught are fairly representative of
killings as a whole.

All crimes naturally tend to divide themselves into two classes--crimes
against property and crimes against the person, each class having an
entirely different assortment of reasons for their commission.

There can be practically but one motive for theft, burglary, or robbery.
It is, of course, conceivable that such crimes might be perpetrated for
revenge--to deprive the victim of some highly prized possession. But in
the main there is only one object--unlawful gain. So, too, blackmail,
extortion, and kidnapping are all the products of the desire for
"easy money." But, unquestionably, this is the reason for murder in
comparatively few cases.

The usual motive for crimes against the person--assault, manslaughter,
mayhem, murder, etc.--is the desire to punish, or be avenged upon
another by inflicting personal pain upon him or by depriving him of his
most valuable asset--life. And this desire for retaliation or revenge
generally grows out of a recent humiliation received at the hands of
the other person, a real or fancied wrong to oneself, a member of
one's family, or one's property. But this was too easy an answer to my
friend's question. He wanted and deserved more than that, and I set out
to give it to him.

My first inquiry was in the direction of original sources. I sought out
the man in the district attorney's office who had had the widest general
experience and put the question to him. This was Mr. Charles C. Nott,
Jr., (now judge of the General Sessions) who had been trying murder
cases for nearly ten years. It so happened that he had kept a complete
record of all of them and this he courteously placed at my disposal. The
list contains sixty-two cases, and the defendants were of divers races.
These homicides included seventeen committed in cold blood (about
twenty-five per cent, an extraordinary percentage) from varying motives,
as follows: One defendant (white) murdered his colored mistress simply
to get rid of her; another killed out of revenge because the deceased
had "licked" him several times before; another, having quarrelled
with his friend over a glass of soda water, later on returned and
precipitated a quarrel by striking him, in the course of which he killed
him; another because the deceased had induced his wife to desert him;
another lay in wait for his victim and killed him without the motive
ever being ascertained; one man killed his brother to get a sum of
money, and another because his brother would not give him money; another
because he believed the deceased had betrayed the Armenian cause to the
Turks; another because he wished to get the deceased out of the way in
order to marry his wife; and another because deceased had knocked him
down the day before. One man had killed a girl who had ridiculed him;
and one a girl who had refused to marry him; another had killed his
daughter because she could no longer live in the house with him; one, an
informer, had been the victim of a Black Hand vendetta; and the last
had poisoned his wife for the insurance money in order to go off with
another woman. There were two cases of infanticide, one in which a woman
threw her baby into the lake in Central Park, and another in which she
gave her baby poison. Besides these murders, five homicides had been
committed in the course of perpetrating other crimes, including burglary
and robbery.

Passing over three cases of culpable negligence resulting in death, we
come to thirty-seven homicides during quarrels, some of which might have
been technically classified as murders, but which being committed
"in the heat of passion," in practically every instance resulted in a
verdict of manslaughter. The quarrels often arose over the most trifling
matters. One was a dispute over a broom, another over a horse blanket,
another over food, another over a twenty-five cent bet in a pool game,
another over a loan of fifty cents, another over ten cents in a crap
game, and still another over one dollar and thirty cents in a crap game.
Five men were killed in drunken rows which had no immediate cause except
the desire to "start something." One man killed another because he had
not prevented the theft of some lumber, one (a policeman) because the
deceased would not "move on" when ordered, one because a bartender
refused to serve him with any more drinks, and one (a bartender) because
the deceased insisted that he should serve more drinks. One man was
killed in a quarrel over politics, one in a fuss over some beer, one in
a card game, one trying to rob a fruit-stand, one in a dispute with a
ship's officer, one in a dance hall row. One man killed another whom
he found with his wife, and one wife killed her husband for a similar
cause; another wife killed her husband simply because she "could not
stand him," and one because he was fighting with their son. One man
was killed by another who was trying to collect from him a debt of six
hundred dollars. One quarrel resulting in homicide arose because the
defendant had pointed out deceased to the police, another because
the participants called each other names, and another arose out of an
alleged seduction. Three homicides grew out of street rows originating
in various ways. One man killed another who was fighting with a friend
of the first, a janitor was killed in a "continuous row" which had been
going on for a long time, and one homicide was committed for "nothing in
particular."

This astonishing olla podrida of reasons for depriving men of their
lives leaves one stunned and confused. Is it possible to deduce any
order out of such homicidal chaos? Still, an attempt to classify such
diverse causes enables one to reach certain general conclusions. Out of
the sixty-two homicides there were seventeen cold-blooded murders,
with deliberation and premeditation (in such cases the reasons for
the killing are by comparison unimportant); three homicides due to
negligence, five committed while perpetrating a felony; thirty-seven
manslaughters, due in sixteen cases to quarrels (simply), thirteen
to drink, four to disputes over money, three to women, one to race
antagonism.

Reclassifying the seventeen murders according to causes, we have:
Six due to women, four to quarrels, five to other causes, and two
infanticides. Added to the manslaughters previously classified, we have
a total of sixty-two killings, due in twenty cases to quarrels, thirteen
to drink, nine to women, four to disputes over money, one to
race antagonism, five to general causes, three to negligence, two
infanticides, five during the commission of other crimes.

The significant features of this analysis are that about seventy-five
per cent of the killings were due to quarrels over small sums or
other matters, drink and women; over fifty per cent to drink and petty
quarrels; and about thirty per cent to quarrels simply. The trifling
character of the causes of the quarrels themselves is shown by the fact
that in three of these particular cases, tried in a single week, the
total amount involved in the disputes was only eighty-five cents. That
is about twenty-eight and one-half cents a life. Many a murder in a
barroom grows out of an argument over whether a glass of beer has, or
has not, been paid for, or whose turn it is to treat; and more than one
man has been killed in New York City because he was too clumsy to avoid
stepping on somebody's feet or bumping into another man on the sidewalk.

The writer sincerely regrets that his own lack of initiative prevented
his keeping a diary during his seven years's service as a prosecutor. It
is now impossible for him to refresh his memory as to the causes of all
the various homicides which he prosecuted, but where he can do so the
evidence points to a conclusion similar to that deduced from Mr. Nott's
record. The proximate causes were trifling--the underlying cause was
the lack of civilization of the defendant--his brutality and absence of
self-control.

With a view to ascertaining conditions in general throughout the United
States, I asked a clipping agency to send me the first one hundred
notices of actual homicides which should come under its scissors. The
immediate result of this experiment was that I received forty-five
notices supposedly relating to murders and homicides, which on closer
examination proved to be anything but what I wanted for the purpose in
view. With only one or two exceptions they related not to deaths from
violence reported as having occurred on any particular day, but to
notices of convictions, acquittals, indictments, pleas of guilty and
not guilty, rewards offered, sentences, executions, "suspicions" of the
police, "mysteries revived," and even editorials on capital punishment.

A letter of protest brought in due course, but much more slowly, one
hundred and seven clippings, which yielded the following reasons why
men killed: There were four suicides, three lynchings, one infanticide,
three murders while resisting arrest, three criminals killed while
resisting arrest, two men killed in riots, eight murders in the
course of committing burglaries and robberies, seven persons killed in
vendettas, three grace murders, and twenty-four killed in quarrels over
petty causes; there were twelve murders from jealousy, followed in
four instances by suicide on the part of the murderer; six killings
justifiable on the "higher law" theory only, but involving great
provocation, and thirty deliberate slaughters. The last clipping
recounted how an irate husband pounded a "masher" so hard that he died.
Leaving out the suicides and those killed while resisting arrest, there
remain one hundred persons murdered, not only by persons insane or
wild from the effects of liquor, but by robbers and burglars, brutes,
bullies, and thugs, husbands, wives, and lovers, and by a vast number of
people who not only destroyed their enemies in the fury of anger, but in
many instances openly went out gunning for them, lay in wait for them in
the dark, or hacked off their heads with hatchets while they slept.

It is, indeed, a sanguinary record, from which little consolation is to
be derived, and the only comfort is the probability that the accounts
of the first one hundred murders anywhere in Europe would undoubtedly be
just as blood-curdling. I had simply asked the clipping bureau to
send me one hundred horrors and I had got them. They did not indicate
anything at all so far as the ratio of homicide to population was
concerned or as to the bloodthirstiness of Americans in general. They
merely showed what despicable things murders were.

As to the reasons for the killings, they were as diverse as those
which Mr. Nott had prosecuted, save that there were more of an ultra
blood-thirsty character, due probably to the fact that the young lady
who did the clipping wanted (after one rebuff) to make sure that I was
satisfied with the goods she sent me. And this suggests a reason for
the large percentage of cold-blooded killings prosecuted by my
friend--namely, that Mr. Nott being the most astute prosecutor
available, the district attorney, whenever the latter had a particularly
atrocious case, sent it to him in order that the defendant might surely
get his full deserts.

The reasons for these homicides were of every sort; police officers and
citizens were shot and killed by criminals trying to make "get-aways,"
and by negroes and others "running amuck"; despondent young men shot
their unresponsive sweethearts and then either blew out their own brains
of pretended to try to do so; two stable-men had a duel with revolvers,
and each killed the other; several men were shot for being too attentive
to young women residing in the same hotels; an Italian, whose wife had
left him and gone to her mother, went to the house and killed her,
her sister, her sister's husband, his mother-in-law, two children, and
finally himself; the "Gopher Gang" started a riot at a "benefit" dance
given to a widow and killed a man, after which they fled to the woods
and fired from cover upon the police until eighteen were overpowered and
arrested; a young girl and her fiance, sitting in the parlor, planning
their honeymoon, were unexpectedly interrupted by a rejected suitor of
the girl's, who shot and killed both of them; an Italian who peeked into
a bedroom, just for fun, afterward rushed in and cut off two persons'
heads with an ax--one of them was his wife; a gang of white ruffians
shot and then burned a negro family of three peacefully working in the
fields; a man who went to the front door to see who had tapped on
his window was shot through the heart; a striker was killed by a
twenty-five-pound piece of flagging thrown from a roof; there was a gun
fight of colored men at Madison, Wisconsin, at which three were shot; a
gang of negro ruffians killed and mutilated a white woman (with a baby
in her arms) and her husband; masked robbers called a man to his barn at
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and cut his throat; an Italian was
found with his head split in two by a butcher's cleaver; a negress in
Lafayette, Louisiana, killed a family of six with a hatchet; a negro
farmer and his two daughters were lynched and their bodies burned by
four white men (who will probably also be lynched if caught); a girl
of eleven shot her girl friend of about the same age and killed her;
several persons were found stabbed to death; a plumber killed his
brother (also a plumber) for saying that he stole two dollars; a
murderer was shot by a posse of militia in a cornfield; a card game at
Bayonne, New Jersey, resulted in a revolver fight on the street in which
one of the players was killed; bank robbers killed a cashier at twelve
o'clock noon; a jealous lover in Butte, Montana, shot and killed his
sweetheart, her father, and mother; a deputy sheriff was murdered;
burglars killed several persons in the course of their business;
Kokolosski, a Pole, kicked his child to death; and a couple of dozen
people were incidentally shot, stabbed, or otherwise disposed of in the
course of quarrels over the most trivial matters. In almost no case was
there what an intelligent, civilized man would regard as an adequate
reason for the homicide. They killed because they felt like killing, and
yielded to the impulse, whatever its immediate origin.

This conclusion is abundantly supported by the figures of the 'Chicago
Tribune' for the seven years ending in 1900, when carefully analyzed.
During this period 62,812 homicides were recorded. Of these there were
17,120 of which the causes were unknown and 3,204 committed while making
a justifiable arrest, in self-defence, or by the insane, so that there
were in fact only 42,488 felonious homicides the causes of which can
be definitely alleged. The ratio of the "quarrels" to this net total is
about seventy-five per cent. There were, in addition, 2,848 homicides
due to liquor--that is, without cause. Thus eighty per cent of all the
murders and manslaughters in the United States for a period of seven
years were for no reason at all or from mere anger or habit, arising out
of causes often of the most trifling character.

Nor are the conclusions changed by the figures of the years between 1904
and 1909.

During this period 61,786 homicides were recorded. Of these there were
9,302 of which the causes were not known, and 2,480 committed while
making a justifiable arrest, in self-defence, or by the insane, leaving
50,004 cases of felonious homicides of known causes. Of these homicides,
33,476 were due to quarrels and 4,799 to liquor, a total of 38,275 out
of the 50,004 cases of known causes being traceable in this, another
seven years, to motives the most casual.

It would be stupid to allege that the reason men killed was because they
had been stepped on or had been deprived of a glass of beer. The cause
lies deeper than that. It rests in the willingness or desire of the
murderer to kill at all. Among barbaric or savage peoples this is
natural; but among civilized nations it is hardly to be anticipated. If
the negro who shoots his fellow because he believes himself to have been
cheated out of ten cents were really civilized, he would either not
have the impulse to kill or, having the impulse to kill, would have
sufficient power of self-control to refrain from doing so. This power
of self-control may be natural or acquired, and it may or may not be
possessed by the man who feels a desire to commit a homicide. The fact
to be observed--the interesting and, broadly speaking, the astonishing
fact--is that among a people like ourselves anybody should have a desire
to kill. It is even more astonishing than that the impulse should be
yielded to so often if it comes.

This, then, is the real reason why men kill--because it is inherent
in their state of mind, it is part of their mental and physical
make-up--they are ready to kill, they want to kill, they are the kind
of men who do kill. This is the result of their heredity, environment,
educational and religious training, or the absence of it. How many
readers of this paper have ever experienced an actual desire to kill
another human being? Probably not one hundredth of one per cent. They
belong to the class of people who either never have such an impulse, or
at any rate have been taught to keep such impulses under control. Hence
it is futile to try to explain that some men kill for a trifling sum of
money, some because they feel insulted, others because of political or
labor disputes, or because they do not like their food. Any one of these
may be the match that sets off the gunpowder, but the real cause of the
killing is the fact that the gunpowder is there, lying around loose,
and ready to be touched off. What engenders this gunpowder state of
mind would make a valuable sociological study, but it may well be that a
seemingly inconsequential fact may so embitter a boy or man toward life
or the human race in general that in time he "sees red" and goes through
the world looking for trouble. Any cause that makes for crime and
depravity makes for murder as well. The little boy who is driven out of
the tenement onto the street, and in turn off the street by a policeman,
until, finding no wholesome place to play, he joins a "gang" and begins
an incipient career of crime, may end in the "death house."

The table on the opposite page gives the figures collected by the
'Chicago Tribune' for the years from 1881 to 1910.

In view of the foregoing it may seem paradoxical for the writer to state
that he questions the alleged unusual tendency to commit murder on the
part of citizens of the United States. Yet of one fact he is absolutely
convinced--namely, that homicide has substantially decreased in the last
fifteen years. Even according to the figures collected by the 'Chicago
Tribune', there were but 8,975 homicides in 1910 as compared with 10,500
in 1895, and 10,652 in 1896. Meantime the population of our country has
been leaping onward.


     NUMBER OF MURDERS AND HOMICIDES IN THE UNITED STATES EACH
     YEAR SINCE 1891, COMPARED WITH THE POPULATION

              NUMBER OF                          NUMBER OF
              MURDERS AND     ESTIMATED          MURDERS AND
     YEAR     HOMICIDES IN    POPULATION         HOMICIDES
              THE UNITED      OF THE             FOR EACH
              STATES          UNITED STATES      MILLION OF
                                                 PEOPLE

     1881......1,266..........51,316,000..........24.7

     1882......1.467..........----------..........27.9

     1883......1,697..........----------..........31.6

     1884......1,465..........----------..........26.7

     1885......1,808..........56,148,000..........32.2

     1886......1,499..........----------..........26.1

     1887......2,335..........----------..........39.8

     1888......2,184..........---------...........36.4

     1889......3,567..........---------...........58.0

     1890......4,290.........62,622,250...........68.5

     1891......5,906..........---------...........92.4

     1892......6,791..........---------..........104.2

     1893......6,615..........---------..........99.5

     1894......9,800..........---------.........144.7

     1895.....10,500.........69,043,000.........152.2

     1896.....10,652..........---------.........151.3

     1897......9,520..........---------.........132.8

     1898......7,840..........---------.........107.2

     1899......6,225..........---------..........83.6

     1900......8,275.........75,994,575.........108.7

     1901......7,852.........77,754,000.........100.9

     1902......8,834.........79,117,000.........111.7

     1903......8,976..........---------.........112.0

     1904......8,482..........---------...............

     1905......9,212..........---------...............

     1906......9,350.........---------................

     1907......8,712..........---------...............

     1908......8,952..........---------...............

     1909......8,103..........---------...............

     1910......8,975.........91,972,266...........97.5

     Total......191,150


We are blood-thirsty enough, God knows, without making things out any
worse than they are. Our murder rate per 100,000 unquestionably exceeds
that of most of the countries of western Europe, but, as the saying is,
"there's a reason." If our homicide statistics related only to the white
population of even the second generation born in this country we should
find, I am convinced, that we are no more homicidal than France and
Belgium, and less so than Italy. It is to be expected that with our
Chinese, "greaser," and half-breed population in the West, our Black
Belt in the South, and our Sicilian and South Italian immigration in the
North and East, our murder rate should exceed those of the continental
nations, which are nothing if not well policed.

But of one thing we can be abundantly certain without any figures at
all, and that is that our present method of administering justice
(less the actions of juries than of judges)--the system taken as a
whole--offers no deterrent to the embryonic or professional criminal.
The administration of justice to-day is not the swift judgment of honest
men upon a criminal act, but a clever game between judge and lawyer, in
which the action of the jury is discounted entirely and the moves are
made with a view to checkmating justice, not in the trial courtroom, but
before the appellate tribunal two or three years later.

"My young feller," said a grizzled veteran of the criminal bar to me
long years ago, after our jury had gone out, "there's lots of things in
this game you ain't got on to yet. Do you think I care what this jury
does? Not one mite. I got a nice little error into the case the very
first day--and I've set back ever since. S'pose we are convicted? I'll
get Jim here [the prisoner] out on a certificate and it'll be two years
before the Court of Appeals will get around to the case. Meantime
Jim'll be out makin' money to pay me my fee--won't you, Jim? Then your
witnesses, will be gone, and nobody'll remember what on earth it's all
about. You'll be down in Wall Street practicing real law yourself, and
the indictment will kick around the office for a year or so, all covered
with dust, and then some day I'll get a friend of mine to come in
quietly and move to dismiss. And it'll be dismissed. Don't you worry!
Why, a thousand other murders will have been committed in this county by
the time that happens. Bless your soul! You can't go on tryin' the same
man forever! Give the other fellers a chance. You shake your head? Well,
it's a fact. I've been doin' it for forty years. You'll see." And I
did. That may not be why men kill, but perhaps indirectly it may have
something to do with it.




CHAPTER V. Detectives and Others


A Detective, according to the dictionaries, is one "whose occupation it
is to discover matters as to which information is desired, particularly
wrong-doers, and to obtain evidence to be used against them." A private
detective, by the same authority, is one "engaged unofficially in
obtaining secret information for or guarding the private interests of
those who employ him." The definition emphasizes the official character
of detectives in general as contrasted with those whose services may be
enlisted for hire by the individual citizen, but the distinction is of
little importance, since it is based arbitrarily upon the character of
the employer (whether the State or a private client) instead of upon the
nature of the employment itself, which is the only thing which is likely
to interest us about detectives at all.

The sanctified tradition that a detective was an agile person with a
variety of side-whiskers no longer obtains even in light literature, and
the most imaginative of us is frankly aware of the fact that a detective
is just a common man earning (or pretending to earn) a common living by
common and obvious means. Yet in spite of ourselves we are accustomed
to attribute superhuman acuteness and a lightning-like rapidity of
intellect to this vague and romantic class of fellow-citizens. The
ordinary work of a detective, however, requires neither of these
qualities. Honesty and obedience are his chief requirements, and if he
have intelligence as well, so much the better, provided it be of the
variety known as "horse" sense. A genuine candidate for the job of
Sherlock Holmes would find little competition. In the first place, the
usual work of a detective does not demand any extraordinary powers of
deduction at all.

Leaving out of consideration those who are merely private policemen
(often in uniform), and principally engaged in patrolling residential
streets, preserving order at fairs, race-tracks, and political meetings,
or in breaking strikes and preventing riots, the largest part of the
work for which detectives are employed is not in the detection of
crime and criminals, but in simply watching people, following them, and
reporting as accurately as possible their movements. These functions are
known in the vernacular as spotting, locating, and trailing. It
requires patience, some powers of observation, and occasionally a little
ingenuity. The real detective under such circumstances is the man to
whom they hand in their reports. Yet much of the most dramatic and
valuable work that is done involves no acuteness at all, but simply a
willingness to act as a spy and to brave the dangers of being found out.

There is nothing more thrilling in the pages of modern history than the
story of the man (James McPartland) who uncovered the conspiracies of
the Molly McGuires. But the work of this man was that of a spy pure and
simple.

Another highly specialized class of detectives is that engaged in police
and banking work, who by experience (or even origin) have a wide and
intimate acquaintance with criminals of various sorts, and by their
familiarity with the latters' whereabouts, associates, work, and methods
are able to recognize and run down the perpetrators of particular
crimes.

Thus, for example, there are men in the detective bureau of New York
City who know by name, and perhaps have a speaking acquaintance with,
a large number of the pick-pockets and burglars of the East Side. They
know their haunts and their ties of friendship or marriage. When any
particular job is pulled off they have a pretty shrewd idea of who is
responsible for it and lay their plans accordingly. If necessary,
they run in the whole gang and put each of them through a course of
interrogation, accusation, and browbeating until some one breaks down
or makes a slip that involves him in a tangle. These men are special
policemen whose knowledge makes them detectives by courtesy. But
their work does not involve any particular superiority or quickness of
intellect--the quality which we are wont to associate with the detection
of crime.

Now, if the ordinary householder finds that his wife's necklace has
mysteriously disappeared, his first impulse is to send for a detective
of some sort or other. In general, he might just as well send for his
mother-in-law. Of course, the police can and will watch the pawnshops
for the missing baubles, but no crook who is not a fool is going to
pawn a whole necklace on the Bowery the very next day after it has been
"lifted." Or he can enlist a private detective who will question the
servants and perhaps go through their trunks, if they will let him.
Either sort will probably line up the inmates of the house for general
scrutiny and try to bully them separately into a confession. This may
save the master a disagreeable experience, but it is the simplest sort
of police work and is done vicariously for the taxpayer, just as the
public garbage man relieves you from the burden of taking out the
ashes yourself, because he is paid for it, not on account of your own
incapacity or his superiority.

The real detective is the one who, taking up the solution of a crime or
other mystery, brings to bear upon it unusual powers of observation
and deduction and an exceptional resourcefulness in acting upon his
conclusions. Frankly, I have known very few such, although for some ten
years I have made use of a large number of so-called detectives in both
public and private matters. As I recall the long line of cases where
these men have rendered service of great value, almost every one
resolves itself into a successful piece of mere spying or trailing.
Little ingenuity or powers of reason were required. Of course, there
are a thousand tricks that an experienced man acquires as a matter of
course, but which at first sight seem almost like inspiration. I shall
not forget my delight when Jesse Blocher, who had been trailing Charles
Foster Dodge through the South (when the latter was wanted as the chief
witness against Abe Hummel on the charge of subornation of perjury of
which he was finally convicted), told me how he instantly located his
man, without disclosing his own identity, by unostentatiously leaving a
note addressed to Dodge in a bright-red envelope upon the office counter
of the Hotel St. Charles in New Orleans, where he knew his quarry to be
staying. A few moments later the clerk saw it, picked it up, and, as
a matter of course, thrust it promptly into box No. 420, thus
involuntarily hanging, as it were, a red lantern on Dodge's door.

There is no more reason to look for superiority of intelligence or
mental alertness among detectives of the ordinary class than there is to
expect it from clerks, stationary engineers, plumbers, or firemen. While
comparisons are invidious, I should be inclined to say that the ordinary
chauffeur was probably a brighter man than the average detective. This
is not to be taken in derogation of the latter, but as a compliment to
the former. There are a great many detectives of ambiguous training. I
remember in one case discovering that of the more important detectives
employed by a well-known private Anti-Criminal Society in New York, one
had been a street vender of frankfurters (otherwise yclept "hot dogs"),
and another the keeper of a bird store, which last perhaps qualified him
for the pursuit and capture of human game. There is a popular fiction
that lawyers are shrewd and capable, similar to the prevailing one
that detectives are astute and cunning. But, as the head of one of
the biggest agencies in the country remarked to me the other day, when
discussing the desirability of retaining local counsel in a distant
city: "You know how hard it is to find a lawyer that isn't a dead one."
I feel confident that he did not mean this in the sense that there was
no good lawyer except a dead lawyer. What my detective friend probably
had in mind was that it was difficult to find a lawyer who brought to
bear on a new problem any originality of thought or action. It is even
harder to find a detective who is not in this sense a dead one. I have
the feeling, being a lawyer myself, that it is harder to find a live
detective than a live lawyer. There are a few of both, however, if you
know where to look for them. But it is easy to fall into the hands of
the Philistines.

The fundamental reason why it is so hard to form any just opinion of
detectives in general is that (except by their fruits) there is little
opportunity to discriminate between the able and the incapable. Now, the
more difficult and complicated his task the less likely is the sleuth
(honest or otherwise) to succeed. The chances are a good deal more than
even that he will never solve the mystery for which he is engaged.
Thus at the end of three months you will have only his reports and his
bill--which are poor comfort, to say the least. And yet he may have
really worked eighteen hours a day in your service. But a dishonest
detective has only to disappear (and take his ease for the same period)
and send you his reports and his bill--and you will have only his word
for how much work he has done and how much money he has spent. You are
absolutely in his power--unless you hire another detective to watch
HIM. Consequently there is no class in the world where the temptation to
dishonesty is greater than among detectives. This, too, is, I fancy,
the reason that the evidence of the police detective is received with so
much suspicion by jurymen--they know that the only way for him to retain
his position is by making a record and getting convictions, and hence
they are always looking for jobs and frame-ups. If a police detective
doesn't make arrests and send a man to jail every once in a while there
is no conclusive way for his superiors to be sure he isn't loafing.

There are a very large number of persons who go into the detective
business for the same reason that others enter the ministry--they can't
make a living at anything else, Provided he has squint eyes and a dark
complexion, almost anybody feels that he is qualified to unravel the
tangled threads of crime. The first resource of the superannuated or
discharged police detective is to start an agency. Of course, he may be
first class in spite of these disqualifications, but the presumption in
the first instance is that he is no longer alert or effective, and
in the second that in one way or another he is not honest. Agencies
recruited from deposed and other ex-policemen usually have all the
faults of the police without any of their virtues. There are many small
agencies which do reliable work, and there are a number of private
detectives in all the big cities who work single-handed and achieve
excellent results. However, if he expects to accomplish anything by
hiring detectives, the layman or lawyer must first make sure of his
agency or his man.

One other feature of the detective business should not be overlooked. In
addition to charging for services not actually rendered and expenses not
actually incurred, there is in many cases a strong temptation to betray
the interests of the employer. A private detective may, and usually
does, become possessed of information even more valuable to the person
who is being watched than to the person to whom he owes his allegiance.
Unreliable rascals constantly sell out to the other side and play
both ends against the middle. In this they resemble some of the famous
diplomatic agents of history. And police detectives employed to run down
criminals and protect society have been known instead to act as stalls
for bank burglars and (for a consideration) to assist them to dispose of
their booty and protect them from arrest and capture. It has repeatedly
happened that reliable private detectives have discovered that the
police employed upon the same case have in reality been tipping off
the criminals as to what was being done and coaching them as to their
conduct. Of course the natural jealousy existing between official and
unofficial agents of the law leads to many unfounded accusations of
this character, but, on the other hand, the fact that much of the most
effective police work is done by employing professional criminals to
secure information and act as stool-pigeons often results in a definite
understanding that the latter shall be themselves protected in the quiet
enjoyment of their labors. The relations of the regular police to crime,
however, and the general subject of police graft have little place in a
chapter of this character.

The first question that usually arises is whether a detective shall or
shall not be employed at all in any particular case. Usually the most
important thing is to find out what the real character, past, and
associations of some particular individual may be. Well-established
detective agencies with offices throughout the country are naturally in
a better position to acquire such information quickly than the private
individual or lawyer, since they are on the spot and have an organized
staff containing the right sort of men for the work. If the information
lies in your own city you can probably hire some one to get it or ferret
it out yourself quite as well, and much more cheaply, than by employing
their services. The leads are few and generally simple. The subject's
past employers and business associates, his landlords and landladies,
his friends and enemies, and his milkman must be run down and
interrogated. Perhaps his personal movements must be watched. Any
intelligent fellow who is out of a job will do this for you for about $5
a day and expenses. The agencies usually charge from $6 to $8 (and up),
and prefer two men to one, as a matter of convenience and to make sure
that the subject is fully covered. If the suspect is on the move and
trains or steamships must be met, you have practically no choice but to
employ a national agency. It alone has the proper plant and equipment
for the work. In an emergency, organization counts more than anything
else. Where time is of the essence, the individual has no opportunity to
hire his own men or start an organization of his own. But if the matter
is one where there is plenty of leisure to act, you can usually do your
own detective work better and cheaper than any one else.

Regarding the work of the detective as a spy (which probably constitutes
seventy-five per cent of his employment to-day), few persons realize
how widely such services are being utilized. The insignificant old
Irishwoman who stumbles against you in the department store is
possibly watching with her cloudy but eagle eye for shoplifters. The
tired-looking man on the street-car may, in fact, be a professional
"spotter." The stout youth with the pince nez who is examining the
wedding presents is perhaps a central-office man. All this you know or
may suspect. But you are not so likely to be aware that the floor-walker
himself is the agent of a rival concern placed in the department store
to keep track, not only of prices but of whether or not the wholesalers
are living up to their agreements in regard to the furnishing of
particular kinds of goods only to one house; or that the conductor on
the car is a paid detective of the company, whose principal duty is not
to collect fares, but to report the doings of the unions; or that the
gentleman who is accidentally introduced to you at the wedding breakfast
is employed by a board of directors to get a line on your host's
business associates and social companions.

In the great struggle between capital and labor, each side has
expended large sums of money in employing confederates to secure secret
information as to the plans and doings of the enemy. Almost every labor
union has its Judas, and less often a secretary to a capitalist is
in the secret employment of a labor union. The railroads must be kept
informed of what is going on, and, if necessary, they import a man from
another part of the country to join the local organization. Often such
men, on account of their force and intelligence, are elected to high
office in the brotherhoods whose secrets they are hired to betray.
Practically every big manufacturing plant in the United States has
on its payrolls men acting as engineers, foremen, or laborers who are
drawing from $80 to $100 per month as detectives either (1) to keep
their employers informed as to the workings of the labor unions, (2)
to report to the directors the actual conduct of the business by its
salaried officers, superintendents, and overseers, or (3) to ascertain
and report to outside competing concerns the methods and processes made
use of, the materials utilized, and the exact cost of production.

There are detectives among the chambermaids and bellboys in the hotels,
and also among the guests; there are detectives on the passenger lists
and in the cardrooms of the Atlantic liners; the colored porter on
the private car, the butler at your friend's house, the chorus girl on
Broadway, the clerk in the law office, the employee in the commercial
agency, may all be drawing pay in the interest of some one else, who may
be either a transportation company, a stock-broker, a rival financier,
a yellow newspaper, an injured or even an erring wife, a grievance
committee, or a competing concern; and the duties of these persons
may and will range from the theft of mailing lists, books, papers,
and private letters, up to genuine detective work requiring some real
ability.

Detective work of the sort which involves the betrayal of confidences
and friendships naturally excites our aversion--yet in many cases the
end undoubtedly justifies the means employed, and often there is no
other way to avert disaster and prevent fiendish crimes. Sometimes, on
the other hand, the information sought is purely for mercenary or even
less worthy reasons, and those engaged in these undertakings range from
rascals of the lowest type to men who are ready to risk death for the
cause which they represent and who are really heroes of a high order.
One of the latter with whom I happened to be thrown professionally was a
young fellow of about twenty named Guthrie.

It was during a great strike, and outrages were being committed all over
the city of New York by dynamiters supposed to be in the employ of
the unions. Young Guthrie, who was a reckless daredevil, offered his
services to the employers, and agreed to join one of the local unions
and try to find out who were the men blowing up office buildings in
process of construction and otherwise terrorizing the inhabitants of the
city. Accordingly he applied for membership in the organization, and by
giving evidence of his courage and fiber managed to secure a place as a
volunteer in the dynamiting squad. So cleverly did he pass himself off
as a bitter enemy of capital that he was entrusted with secrets of
the utmost value and took part in making the plans and procuring the
dynamite to execute them. The quality of his nerve (as well as his
foolhardiness) is shown by the fact that he once carried a dress-suit
case full of the explosive around the city, jumping on and off street
cars, and dodging vehicles. When the proper moment came and the dynamite
had been placed in an uncompleted building on Twenty-second Street,
Guthrie gave the signal and the police arrested the dynamiters--all of
them, including Guthrie, who was placed with the rest in a cell in
the Tombs and continued to report to the district attorney all the
information which he thus secured from his unsuspecting associates.
Indeed, it was hard to convince the authorities that Guthrie was a spy
and not a mere accomplice who had turned State's evidence, a distinction
of far-reaching legal significance so far as his evidence was concerned.

The final episode in the drama was the unearthing by the police of
Hoboken of the secret cache of the dynamiters, containing a large
quantity of the explosive. Guthrie's instructions as to how they should
find it read like a page from Poe's "Gold Bug." You had to go at night
to a place where a lonely road crossed the Erie Railroad tracks in the
Hackensack meadows, and mark the spot where the shadow of a telegraph
pole (cast by an arc light) fell on a stone wall. This you must climb
and walk so many paces north, turn and go so many feet west, and then
north again. You then came to a white stone, from which you laid your
course through more latitude and longitude until you were right over the
spot. The police of Hoboken did as directed, and after tacking round and
round the field, found the dynamite. Of course, the union said the whole
thing was a plant, and that Guthrie had put the dynamite in the field
himself at the instigation of his employers, but before the case came to
trial both dynamiters pleaded guilty and went to Sing Sing. One of them
turned out to be an ex-convict, a burglar. I often wonder where Guthrie
is now. He certainly cared little for his life. Perhaps he is down in
Venezuela or Mexico. He could never be aught than a soldier of fortune.
But for a long time the employers thought that Guthrie was a detective
sent by the unions to compromise THEM in the very dynamiting they were
trying to stop!

I once had a particularly dangerous and unfortunate case where a private
client was being blackmailed by a half-crazy ruffian who had never seen
him, but had selected him arbitrarily as a person likely to give
up money. The blackmailer was a German Socialist, who was out of
employment--a man of desperate character. He had made up his mind that
the world owed him a living, and he had decided that the easiest way
to get it was to make some more prosperous person give him a thousand
dollars under threat of being exposed as an enemy of society.

The charge was so absurd as to be almost ludicrous, but had my client
caused the blackmailer's arrest the matter would have been the subject
of endless newspaper notoriety and comment. It was therefore thought
wise to make use of other means, and I procured the assistance of
a young German-American of my acquaintance, who, in the guise of
a vaudeville artist seeking a job, went to the blackmailer's
boarding-house and pretended to be looking for an actor friend with a
name not unlike that of the criminal.

After two or three visits he managed to scrape an acquaintance with the
blackmailer and thereafter spent much time with him. Both were out of
work, both were German, and both liked beer. My friend had just enough
money to satisfy this latter craving. In a month or so they were
intimate friends and used to go fishing together down the bay. At last,
after many months, the criminal disclosed to the detective his plan of
blackmailing my client, and suggested that as two heads were better than
one they had better make it a joint venture. The detective pretended to
balk at the idea at first, but was finally persuaded, and at the other's
request undertook the delivery of the blackmailing letters to my client!
Inside of three weeks he had in his possession enough evidence in the
criminal's own handwriting to send him to a prison for the rest of his
life. When at last the detective disclosed his identity the blackmailer
at first refused to believe him, and then literally rolled on the floor
in his agony and fear at discovering how he had been hoodwinked. The
next day he disappeared and has not been heard of since, but his letters
are in my vault, ready to be used if he again puts in an appearance.

The records of the police and of the private agencies contain many
instances where murderers have confessed their guilt long after the
crime to supposed friends, who were in reality decoys placed there for
that very purpose. It is a peculiarity of criminals that they cannot
keep their secrets locked in their own breasts. The impulse to
confession is universal, particularly in women. Egotism has some part in
this, but the chief element is the desire for companionship. Criminals
have a horror of dying under an alias. The dignity of identity appeals
even to the tramp. This impulse leads oftentimes to the most unnecessary
and suicidal disclosures. The murderer who has planned and executed a
diabolical homicide and who has retired to obscurity and safety will
very likely in course of time make a clean breast of it to some one whom
he believes to be his friend. He wants to "get it off his chest," to
talk it over, to discuss its fine points, to boast of how clever he was,
to ask for unnecessary advice about his conduct in the future, to
have at least one other person in the world who has seen his soul's
nakedness.

The interesting feature of such confessions from a legal point of view
is that, no matter how circumstantial they may be, they are not usually
of themselves sufficient under our law to warrant a conviction. The
admission or confession of a defendant needs legal corroboration. This
corroboration is often very difficult to find, and frequently cannot be
secured at all. This provision of the statutes is doubtless a wise one
to prevent hysterical, suicidal, egotistical, and semi-insane persons
from meeting death in the electric chair or on the gallows, but it often
results in the guilty going unpunished. Personally, I have never known a
criminal to confess a crime of which he was innocent. The nearest thing
to it in my experience is when one criminal, jointly guilty with another
and sure of conviction, has drawn lots with his pal, lost, confessed,
and in the confession exculpated his companion.

In the police organization of almost every large city there are a few
men who are genuinely gifted for the work of detection. Such an one was
Guiseppe Petrosino, a great detective, and an honest, unselfish,
and heroic man, who united indefatigable patience and industry with
reasoning powers of a high order. The most thrilling evening of my life
was when I listened before a crackling fire in my library to Joe's
story of the Van Cortlandt Park murder, the night before I was going to
prosecute the case. Sitting stiffly in an arm-chair, his ugly moon-face
expressionless save for an occasional flash from his black eyes,
Petrosino recounted slowly and accurately how, by means of a single
slip of paper bearing the penciled name "Sabbatto Gizzi, P.O. Box 239,
Lambertville, N.J.," he had run down the unknown murderer of an unknown
Italian stabbed to death in the park's shrubbery.

Petrosino's physical characteristics were so pronounced that he was
probably as widely, if not more widely, known than any other Italian
in New York. He was short and heavy, with enormous shoulders and a bull
neck, on which was placed a great round head like a summer squash. His
face was pock-marked, and he talked with a deliberation that was due to
his desire for accuracy, but which at times might have been suspected
to arise from some other cause. He rarely smiled and went methodically
about his business, which was to drive the Italian criminals out of the
city and country. Of course, being a marked man in more senses than one,
it was practically impossible to disguise himself, and, accordingly,
he had to rely upon his own investigations and detective powers,
supplemented by the efforts of the trained men in the Italian branch,
many of whom are detectives of a high order of ability. If the life of
Petrosino were to be written, it would be a book unique in the history
of criminology and crime, for this man was probably the only great
detective of the world to find his career in a foreign country amid
criminals of his own race.

I have instanced Petrosino as an example of a police detective of a very
unusual type, but I have known several other men on the New York Police
Force of real genius in their own particular lines of work. One of these
is an Irishman who makes a specialty of get-rich-quick men, oil and
mining stock operators, wire-tappers and their kin, and who knows the
antecedents and history of most of them better than any other man in the
country. He is ready to take the part of either a "sucker" or a fellow
crook, as the exigencies of the case may demand.

There are detectives--real ones--on the police force of all the great
cities of the world to-day, most of them specialists, a few of them
geniuses capable of undertaking the ferreting out of any sort of
mystery, but the last are rare. The police detective usually lacks the
training, education, and social experience to make him effective in
dealing with the class of elite criminals who make high society their
field. Yet, of course, it is this class of crooks who most excite our
interest and who fill the pages of popular detective fiction.

The headquarters man has no time nor inclination to follow the sporting
duchess and the fictitious earl who accompanies her in their picturesque
wanderings around the world. He is busy inside the confines of his own
country. Parents or children may disappear, but the mere seeking of
oblivion on their part is no crime and does not concern him except by
special dispensation on the part of his superiors. Divorced couples may
steal their own children back and forth, royalties may inadvertently
involve themselves with undesirables, governmental information exude
from State portals in a peculiar manner, business secrets pass into
the hands of rivals, racehorses develop strange and untimely diseases,
husbands take long and mysterious trips from home--a thousand exciting
and worrying things may happen to the astonishment, distress, or
intense interest of nations, governments, political parties, or private
individuals, which from their very nature are outside the purview of the
regular police. Here, then, is the field of the secret agent or private
detective, and here, forsooth, is where the detective of genuine
deductive powers and the polished address of the so-called "man of the
world" is required.

There are two classes of cases where a private detective must needs be
used, if indeed any professional assistance is to be called in: first,
where the person whose identity is sought to be discovered or whose
activities are sought to be terminated is not a criminal or has
committed no crime, and second, where, though a crime has been
committed, the injured parties cannot afford to undertake a public
prosecution.

For example, if you are receiving anonymous letters, the writer of which
accuses you of all sorts of unpleasant things, you would, of course,
much prefer to find out who it is and stop him quietly than to turn over
the correspondence to the police and let the writer's attorneys publicly
cross-examine you at his trial as to your past career. Even if a diamond
necklace is stolen from a family living on Fifth Avenue, there is more
than an even chance that the owner will prefer to conceal her loss
rather than to have her picture in the morning paper. Yet she will wish
to find the necklace if she can.

When the matter has no criminal side at all, the police cannot be
availed of, although we sometimes read that the officers of the local
precinct have spent many hours in trying to locate Mrs. So-and-So's lost
Pomeranian, or in performing other functions of an essentially private
nature--most generously. But if, for example, your daughter is made the
recipient, almost daily, of anonymous gifts of jewelry which arrive
by mail, express, or messenger, and you are anxious to discover the
identity of her admirer and return them, you will probably wish to
engage outside assistance.

Where will you seek it? You can do one of two things: go to a big agency
and secure the services of the right man, or engage such a man outside
who may or may not be a professional detective. I have frequently
utilized with success in peculiar and difficult cases the services of
men whom I knew to be common-sense persons, with a natural taste for
ferreting out mysteries, but who were not detectives at all. Your head
bookkeeper may have real talents in this direction--if he is not above
using them. Naturally, the first essential is brains--and if you can
give the time to the matter, your own head will probably be the best
one for your purposes. If, then, you are willing to undertake the job
yourself, all you need is some person or persons to carry out your
instructions, and such are by no means difficult to find. I have had
many a case run down by my own office force--clerks, lawyers, and
stenographers, all taking a turn at it. Why not? Is the professional
sleuth working on a fixed salary for a regular agency and doing a dozen
different jobs each month as likely to bring to bear upon your own
private problem as much intelligence as you yourself?

There is no mystery about such work, except what the detective himself
sees fit to enshroud it with. Most of us do detective work all the time
without being conscious of it. Simply because the matter concerns the
theft of a pearl, or the betraying of a business or professional secret,
or the disappearance of a friend, the opinion of a stranger becomes no
more valuable. And the chances are equal that the stranger will make a
bungle of it.

Many of the best available detectives are men who work by themselves
without any permanent staff, and who have their own regular clients,
generally law firms and corporations. Almost any attorney knows several
such, and the chief advantage of employing one of them lies in the fact
that you can learn just what their abilities are by personal experience.
They usually command a high rate of remuneration, but deductive ability
and resourcefulness are so rare that they are at a premium and can only
be secured by paying it. These men are able, if necessary, to assume
the character of a doctor, traveller, man-about-town, or business agent
without wearing in their lapels a sign that they are detectives, and
they will reason ahead of the other fellow and can sometimes calculate
pretty closely what he will do. Twenty-five dollars a day will generally
hire the best of them, and they are well worth it.

The detective business swarms with men of doubtful honesty and morals,
who are under a constant temptation to charge for services not rendered
and expenses not incurred, who are accustomed to exaggeration if not
to perjury, and who have neither the inclination nor the ability to do
competent work.

Once they get their clutches on a wealthy client, they resemble the
shyster lawyer in their efforts to bleed him by stimulating his fears of
publicity and by holding out false hopes of success, and thus prolonging
their period of service. An unscrupulous detective will, almost as a
matter of course, work on two jobs at once and charge all his time to
each client. He will constantly report progress when nothing has been
accomplished, and his expenses will fill pages of his notebook. Meantime
his daily reports will fall like a shower of autumn leaves. In no
profession is it more essential to know the man who is working for you.
If you need a detective, get the best you can find, put a limit on the
expense, and give him your absolute confidence.




CHAPTER VI. Detectives Who Detect


In the preceding chapter the writer discussed at some length the real,
as distinguished from the fancied, attributes of detectives in general,
and the weaknesses as well as the virtues of the so-called detective
"agency." There are in the city of New York at the present time about
one hundred and fifty licensed detectives. Under the detective license
laws each of these has been required to file with the State comptroller
written evidences of his competency, and integrity, approved by five
reputable freeholders of his county, and to give bond in the sum of
two thousand dollars. He also has to pay a license fee of one hundred
dollars per annum, but this enables him to employ as many "operators"
as he chooses. In other words, the head of the agency may be of good
character and his agents wholly undesirable citizens. How often this is
the case is known to none better than the heads themselves. The strength
and efficiency of a detective agency does not lie in the name at the
top of its letter-paper, but in the unknown personnel of the men who are
doing or shirking the work. I believe that most of the principals of
the many agencies throughout the United States are animated by a serious
desire to give their clients a full return for their money and loyal and
honest service. But the best intentions in the world cannot make up
for the lack of untiring vigilance in supervising the men who are being
employed in the client's service.

It is the right here that the "national" has an immense advantage
over the small agency which cannot afford to keep a large staff of men
constantly on hand, but is forced to engage them temporarily as they may
be needed. The "national" agency can shift its employees from place
to place as their services are required, and the advantages of
centralization are felt as much in this sort of work as in any other
industry. The licensed detective who sends out a hurry call for
assistants is apt to be able to get only men whom he would otherwise not
employ. In this chapter, the word "national," as applied to a detective
agency, refers not to the title under which such an agency may do its
business, but to the fact that it is organized and equipped to render
services all over the country.

In this connection it is worth noticing that the best detective agencies
train their own operators, selecting them from picked material. The
candidate must as rule be between twenty and thirty-five years of age,
sound of body, and reasonably intelligent. He gets pretty good wages
from the start. From the comparatively easy work of watching or
"locating," he is advanced through the more difficult varieties of
"shadowing" and "trailing," until eventually he may develop into a
first-class man who will be set to unravel a murder mystery or to "rope"
a professional criminal. But with years of training the best material
makes few real detectives, and the real detective remains in fact the
man who sits at the mahogany desk in the central office and presses the
row of mother of pearl buttons in front of him.

If you know the heads or superintendents of the large agencies you will
find that the "star" cases, of which they like to talk, are, for the
most part, the pursuit and capture of forgers and murderers. The
former, as a rule, are "spotted" and "trailed" to their haunts, and when
sufficient evidence has been obtained the police are notified, and a
raid takes place, or the arrest is made, by the State authorities.
In the case of a murderer, in a majority of cases, his capture is the
result of skilful "roping" by an astute detective who manages to get
into his confidence. For example, a murder is committed by an
Italian miner. Let us suppose he has killed his "boss," or even the
superintendent or owner. He disappears. As the reader known, the
Italians are so secretive that it is next to impossible to secure any
information--even from the relatives of the murdered man.

The first thing is to locate the assassin. An Italian detective is sent
into the mine as a laborer. Months may elapse before he gets on familiar
or intimate terms with his fellows. All the time he is listening and
watching. Presently he hears something that indicates that the murderer
is communicating with one of his old friends either directly or through
third parties. It is then generally only a question of time before his
whereabouts are ascertained. Once he is "located" the same method is
followed in securing additional evidence or material in the nature of
a confession or admission tending to establish guilt. Having previously
"roped" the murderer's friends, the detective now proceeds to the more
difficult task of "roping" the murderer himself. Of course, the life
of a detective in a Pennsylvania coal mine would be valueless if his
identity were discovered, and yet the most daring pieces of detective
work are constantly being performed under these and similar conditions.
Where the criminal is not known, the task becomes far more difficult and
at times exceedingly dangerous.

One of my own friends, an Italian gentleman, spent several months in the
different mines of this country, where Italians are largely employed,
investigating conditions and ascertaining for the benefit of his
government the extent to which anarchy was prevalent. It was necessary
for him to secure work as a miner at the lowest wages and to disguise
himself in such a way that it would be impossible for anybody to detect
his true character. Fortunately, the great diversity of Italian dialects
facilitated his efforts and enabled him to pass himself off as
from another part of the country than his comrades. Having made his
preparations he came to New York as an immigrant and joined a party of
newly arrived Italians on their way to the coal mines of West Virginia.
Without following him further, it is enough to say that during his
service in the mines he overheard much that was calculated to interest
exceedingly the authorities at Rome. Had his disguise been penetrated
the quick thrust of a five-inch blade would have ended his career.
He would never have returned to New York. There would only have been
another dead "Dago" miner. The local coroner would have driven up in
his buggy, looked at the body, examined the clean, deep wound in the
abdomen, shrugged his shoulders, and empanelled a hetrogeneous jury who
would have returned a verdict to the effect that "deceased came to
his death through a stab wound inflicted by some person to the jury
unknown." My friend was not a professional detective, but the recital of
his experiences was enough to fill me with new respect for those engaged
in the "man hunt" business among the half civilized miners of the coal
regions.

But the work of even the "national" agencies is not of the kind which
the novel-reading public generally associates with detectives--that is
to say, it rarely deals with the unravelling of "mysteries," except the
identity of passers of fraudulent paper and occasional murderers. The
protection of the banks is naturally the most important work that such
an agency can perform.

The National Bankers' Association has eleven thousand members.
"Pinkerton's Bank and Bankers' Protection" also has a large organization
of subscribers. These devote themselves to identifying and running down
all criminals whose activities are dangerous to them. Here the agency
and the police work hand in hand, exchanging photographs of crooks and
suspects and keeping closely informed as to each other's doings. Yet
there is no official connection between any detective agency and the
police of any city. It is an almost universal rule that a private
detective shall not make an arrest. The reasons for this are manifold.
In the first place, the private detective has neither the general
authority nor the facilities for the manual detention of a criminal. A
blue coat and brass buttons, to say nothing of a night stick, are often
invaluable stage properties in the last act of the melodrama. And as the
criminal authorities are eventually to deal with the defendant anyway,
it is just as well if they come into the case as soon as may be. It goes
without saying, of course, that a detective per se has no more right to
make an arrest than any private citizen--nor has a policeman, for that
matter, save in exceptional cases. The officer is valuable for his
dignity, avoirdupois, "bracelets," and other accessories. The police
thus get the credit of many arrests in difficult cases where all the
work has been done by private detectives, and it is good business for
the latter to let them know it.

One of the chief assets of the big agency is its accumulated information
concerning all sorts of professional criminals. Its galleries are quite
as complete as those of the local police headquarters, for a constant
exchange of art objects is going on with the police throughout the
world. And as the agency is protecting banks all over the United States
it has greater interest in all bank burglars as a class than the police
of any particular city who are only concerned with the burglars who
(as one might say) burgle in their particular burg. Thus, you are more
likely to find a detective from a national agency than a sleuth from
300 Mulberry Street, New York, following a forger to Australasia or
Polynesia.

The best agencies absolutely decline to touch divorce and matrimonial
cases of any sort. It does not do a detective agency any good to have
its men constantly upon the witness stand subject to attack, with
a consequent possible reflection upon their probity of character or
truthfulness. Moreover, a good detective is too valuable a person to
be wasting his time in the court-room. In the ordinary divorce case the
detective, having procured evidence, is obliged to remain on tap and
subject to call as a witness for at least three or four months, during
which time he cannot be sent away on distant work. Neither can the
customer be charged ordinarily for waiting time, and apart from its
malodorous character the business is not desirable from a financial
point of view.

The national agencies prefer clean criminal work, murder cases,
and general investigating. They no longer undertake any policing,
strike-breaking, or guarding. The most ridiculous misinformation in
regard to their participation in this sort of work has been spread
broadcast largely by jealous enemies and by the labor unions.

By way of illustration, one Thomas Beet, describing himself as an
English detective, contributed an article to the 'New York Tribune' of
September 16, 1906, in which he said:

"In one of the greatest of our strikes, that involving the steel
industry, over two thousand armed detectives were employed supposedly to
protect property, while several hundred men were scattered in the ranks
of strikers as workmen. Many of the latter became officers in the labor
bodies, helped to make laws for the organizations, made incendiary
speeches, cast their votes for the most radical movements made by the
strikers, participated in and led bodies of the members in the acts of
lawlessness that eventually caused the sending of State troops and the
declaration of martial law. While doing this, these spies within
the ranks were making daily reports of the plans and purposes of the
strikers. To my knowledge, when lawlessness was at its height and murder
ran riot, these men wore little patches of white on the lapels of their
coats so that their fellow detectives of the two thousand would not
shoot them down by mistake."

He, of course, referred to the great strike at Homestead, Pennsylvania,
in 1892. In point of fact, there were only six private detectives
engaged on the side of the employers at that time, and these were there
to assist the local authorities in taking charge of six hundred and
fifty watchmen, and to help place the latter upon the property of the
steel company. These watchmen were under the direction of the sheriff
and sworn in as peace officers of the county. Mr. Beet seems to
have confused his history and mixed up the white handkerchief of the
Huguenots of Nantes with the strike-breakers of Pennsylvania. It is
needless to repeat (as Mr. Robert A. Pinkerton stated at the time),
that the white label story is ridiculously' untrue, and that it was the
strikers who attacked the watchmen, and not the watchmen the strikers.
One striker and one watchman were killed.

But this attack of Mr. Beet upon his own profession, under the guise
of being an English detective (it developed that he was an ex-divorce
detective from New York City), was not confined to his remarks about
inciting wanton murder. On the contrary, he alleged (as one having
authority and not merely as a scribe) that American detective agencies
were practically nothing but blackmailing concerns, which used the
information secured in a professional capacity to extort money from
their own clients.

"Think of the so-called detective," says Mr. Beet, "whose agency pays
him two dollars or two dollars and fifty cents a day, being engaged upon
confidential work and in the possession of secrets that he knows
are worth money! Is it any wonder that so many cases are sold out by
employees, even when the agencies are honest?"

We are constrained to answer that it is no more wonderful than that any
person earning the same sum should remain honest when he might so easily
turn thief. As the writer has himself pointed out in these pages, there
are hundreds of so-called detective agencies which are but traps for the
guileless citizen who calls upon them for aid. But there are many which
are as honestly conducted as any other variety of legitimate business. I
do not know Mr. Beet's personal experience, but it appears to have been
unfortunate. At any rate, his diatribe is unfounded and false, and the
worst feature of it is his assertion that detective agencies make a
business of manufacturing cases when there happen to be none on hand.

"Soon," says he, "there were not enough cases to go around, and then
with the aid of spies and informers the unscrupulous detectives began to
make cases. Agencies began to work up evidence against persons and then
resorted to blackmail, or else approached those to whom the information
might be valuable, and by careful manoeuvring had themselves retained
to unravel the case. This brought into existence hordes of professional
informers who secured the opening wedges for the fake agencies. Men and
women, many of them of some social standing, made it a practice to pry
around for secrets which might be valuable able; spies kept up their
work in large business establishments and began to haunt the cafes and
resorts of doubtful reputation, on the watch for persons of wealth
and prominence who might be foolish enough to place themselves in
compromising circumstances. Even the servants in wealthy families soon
learned that certain secrets of the master and mistress could be
turned to profitable account. We shudder when we hear of the system
of espionage maintained in Russia, while in the large American cities,
unnoticed, are organizations of spies and informers on every hand who
spend their lives digging pitfalls for the unwary who can afford to
pay."

One would think that we were living in the days of the Borgias! "Ninety
per cent," says Mr. Beet, "of private detective agencies are rotten to
the core and simply exist and thrive upon a foundation of dishonesty,
deceit, conspiracy, and treachery to the public in general and their own
patrons in particular. There are detectives at the heads of prominent
agencies in this country whose pictures adorn the Rogues' Gallery; men
who have served time in various prisons for almost every crime on the
calendar."

This harrowing picture has the modicum of truth that makes it
insidiously dangerous. But this last extravagance betrays the
denunciator. One would be interested to have this past-master of
overstatement mention the names of these distinguished crooks that head
the prominent agencies. Their exposure, if true, would not be libellous,
and it would seem that he had performed but half his duty to the public
in refraining from giving this important, if not vital, information.

I know several of these gentlemen whose pictures I feel confident do not
appear in the Rogues' Gallery, and who have not been, as yet, convicted
of crime. A client is as safe in the hands of a good detective agency as
he is in the hands of a good attorney; he should know his agency, that
is all--just as he should know his lawyer. The men at the head of the
big agencies generally take the same pride in their work as the members
of any other profession. They know that a first-class reputation for
honesty is essential to their financial success and that good will is
their stock in trade. Take this away and they would have nothing.

In 1878 the founder of one of the most famous of our national agencies
promulgated in printed form for the benefit of his employees what he
called his general principles. One of these was the following:

"This agency only offers its services at a stated per diem for each
detective employed on an operation, giving no guarantee of success,
except in the reputation for reliability and efficiency; and any person
in its service who shall, under any circumstances, permit himself or
herself to receive a gift, reward, or bribe shall be instantly dismissed
from the service."

Another:

"The profession of the detective is a high and honorable calling. Few
professions excel it. He is an officer of justice, and must himself be
pure and above reproach."

Again:

"It is an evidence of the unfitness of the detective for his profession
when he is compelled to resort to the use of intoxicating liquors; and,
indeed, the strongest kind of evidence, if he continually resorts to
this evil practice. The detective must not do anything to farther sink
the criminal in vice or debauchery, but, on the contrary, must seek to
win his confidence by endeavoring to elevate him, etc."

"Kindness and justice should go hand in hand, whenever it is possible,
in the dealings of the detective with the criminal. There is no human
being so degraded but there is some little bright spark of conscience
and of right still existing in him."

Last:

"The detective must, in every instance, report everything which is
favorable to the suspected party, as well as everything which may be
against him."

The man who penned these principles had had the safety of Abraham
Lincoln in his keeping; and these simple statements are the best
refutation of the baseless assertions above referred to.

It may be that in those days the detection of crime was a bit more
elementary than at the present time. One can hardly picture a modern
sleuth delaying long in an attempt to evangelize his quarry, but these
general principles are the right stuff and shine like good deeds in a
naughty world.

As one peruses this little pink pamphlet he is constantly struck by the
repeated references to the detective as an actor. That was undoubtedly
the ancient concept of a sleuth. "He must possess, also, the player's
faculty of assuming any character that his case may require, and of
acting it out to the life with an ease and naturalness which shall not
be questioned." This somewhat large order is, to our relief, qualified a
little later on. "It is not to be expected, however," the author admits,
"that every detective shall possess these rare qualifications, although
the more talented and versatile he is, the higher will be the sphere of
operation which he will command."

The modern detective agency is conducted on business principles and does
not look for histrionic talent or general versatility. As one of the
heads of a prominent agency said to me the other day:

"When we want a detective to take the part of a plumber we get a
plumber, and when we need one to act as a boiler-maker we go out and get
a real one--if we haven't one on our pay rolls."

"But," I replied, "when you need a man to go into a private family and
pretend to be an English clergyman, or a French viscount, or a brilliant
man of the world--who do you send?"

The "head" smiled.

"The case hasn't arisen yet," said he. "When it does I guess we'll get
the real thing."

The national detective agency, with its thousands of employees who have,
most of them, grown up and received their training in its service, is a
powerful organization, highly centralized, and having an immense sinking
fund of special knowledge and past experience. This is the product of
decades of patient labor and minute record. The agency which offers
you the services of a Sherlock Holmes is a fraud, but you can accept as
genuine a proposition to run down any man whose picture you may be able
to identify in the gallery. The day of the impersonator is over. The
detective of this generation is a hard-headed business man with a stout
pair of legs.

This accumulated fund of information is the heritage of an honest and
long established industry. It is seventy-five per cent of its capital.
It is entirely beyond the reach of the mushroom agency, which in
consequence has to accept less desirable retainers involving no such
requirements, or go to the wall. The collection of photographs is almost
priceless and the clippings, letters, and memoranda in the filing cases
only secondarily so. Very few of the "operators" pretend to anything but
common-sense, with perhaps some special knowledge of the men they
are after. They are not clairvoyants or mystery men, but they will
tirelessly follow a crook until they get him. They are the regular
troops who take their orders without question. The real "detective" is
the "boss" who directs them.

The reader can easily see that in all cases where a crime, such as
forgery, is concerned, once the identity of the criminal is ascertained,
half the work (or more than half) is done. The agencies know the face
and record of practically every man who ever flew a bit of bad paper in
the United States, in England, or on the Continent. If an old hand gets
out of prison his movements are watched until it is obvious that he does
not intend to resort to his old tricks. After the criminal is known or
"located," the "trailing" begins and his "connections" are carefully
studied. This may or may not require what might be called real detective
work; that is to say, work requiring superior power of deducing
conclusions from first-hand information, coupled with unusual skill
in acting upon them. Mere trailing is often simple, yet sometimes
very difficult. A great deal depends on the operator's own peculiar
information as to his man's habits, haunts, and associates. It is very
hard to say in most cases just where mere knowledge ends and detective
work proper begins. As for disguises, they are almost unknown, except
such as are necessary to enable an operator to join a gang where his
quarry may be working and "rope" him into a confession.

Detective agencies of the first-class are engaged principally in
clean-cut criminal work, such as guarding banks from forgers and
"yeggmen"--an original and dangerous variety of burglar peculiar to the
United States and Canada. In other words, they have large associations
of clients who need more protection than the regular police can give
them, and whose interest it is that the criminal shall not only be
driven out of town, but run down (wherever he may be), captured, and put
out of the way for as long a time as possible.

The work done for private individuals is no less important and
effective, but it is secondary to the other. The great value of the
"agency" to the victim of a theft is the speed with which it can
disseminate its information--something quite impossible so far as the
individual citizen is concerned. Let me give an illustration or two.

Between 10.30 P.M. Saturday, February 25, 1911, and 9.30 A.M. Sunday,
February 26, 1911, one hundred and thirty thousand dollars worth of
pearls belonging to Mrs. Maldwin Drummond were stolen from a stateroom
on the steamship 'Amerika' of the Hamburg-American line. The London
underwriters cabled five thousand dollars reward and retained to
investigate the case a well-known American agency, which before
the 'Amerika' had reached Plymouth on her return trip had their
notifications in the hands of all the jewelers and police officials of
Europe and the United States, and had covered every avenue of disposal
in North and South America. In addition, this agency investigated every
human being on the Amerika from first cabin to forecastle.

Within a year or so an aged stock-broker, named Bancroft, was robbed
on the street of one hundred thousand dollars in securities. Inside of
fifty-five minutes after he had reported his loss a detective agency had
notified all banks, brokers, and the police in fifty-six cities of the
United States and Canada.

In the story books your detective scans with eagle eye the surface of
the floor for microscopic evidences of crime. His mind leaps from a
cigar ash to a piece of banana peel and thence to what the family had
for dinner. His brain is working all the time. It is, of course, all
quite wonderful and most excellent reading, and the old-style sleuth
really thought he could do it! Nowadays, while the fake detective
is snooping around the back piazza with a telescope, the real one is
getting the "dope" from the village blacksmith or barber or the waitress
at the station. He may not be highly intelligent, but he knows the
country, and, what is more important, he knows the people. All the
brains in the world cannot make up for the lack of an elementary
knowledge of the place and the characters themselves. It stands to
reason that no strange detective could form as good an opinion as to
which of the members of your household would be most likely to steal a
piece of jewelry as you could yourself. Yet the old-fashioned Sherlock
knew and knows it all.

One of the best illustrations of the practical necessity of some
first-hand knowledge is that afforded by the recovery of a diamond
necklace belonging to the wife of a gentleman in a Connecticut town.
The facts that are given here are absolutely accurate. The gentleman in
question was a retired business man of some means who lived not far from
the town and who made frequent visits to New York City. He had made his
wife a present of a fifteen thousand-dollar diamond necklace, which she
kept in a box in a locked trunk in her bedroom. While she had owned
the necklace for over a year she had never worn it. One evening having
guests for dinner on the occasion of her wedding anniversary she decided
to put it on and wear it for the first time. That night she replaced it
in its box and enclosed this in another box, which she locked and placed
in her bureau drawer. This she also locked. The following night she
decided to replace the necklace in the trunk. She accordingly unlocked
the bureau drawer, and also the larger box, which apparently was in
exactly the same condition as when she had put it away. But the inner
box was empty and the necklace had absolutely disappeared. Now, no
one had seen the necklace for a year, and then only her husband, their
servants, and two or three old friends. No outsider could have known of
its existence. There was no evidence of the house or bureau having been
disturbed.

A New York detective agency was at once retained, which sent one of its
best men to the scene of the crime. He examined the servants, heard the
story, and reported that it must have been an inside job--that there was
no possibility of anything else. But there was nothing to implicate any
one of the servants, and there seemed no hope of getting the necklace
back. Two or three days later the husband turned up at the agency's
office in New York, and after beating about the bush for a while,
remarked:

"I want to tell you something. You have got this job wrong. There's one
fact your man didn't understand. The truth is that I'm a pretty easy
going sort, and every six months or so I take all the men and girls
employed around my house down to Coney Island and give 'em a rip-roaring
time. I make 'em my friends, and I dance with the girls and I jolly
up the men, and we are all good pals together. Sort of unconventional,
maybe, but it pays. I know--see?--that there isn't a single one of those
people who would do me a mean trick. Not one of 'em but would lend me
all the money he had. I don't care what your operator says, the person
who took that necklace came from outside. You take that from me. The
superintendent, who is wise in his generation, scratched his chin.

"Is that dead on the level?" he inquired.

"Gospel!" answered the other.

"I'll come up myself!" said the boss.

Next day the boss behind a broken-winded horse, in a dilapidated buggy,
drove from another town to the place where his client lived. At the
smithy on the crossroads he stopped and borrowed a match.

"Anybody have good hosses in this town?" asked the detective.

"Sure!" answered the smith. "Mr. ------ up on the hill has the best in
the county!"

"What sort of a feller is he?"

The smith chewed in silence for a moment.

"Don't know him myself, but I tell you what, his help says he's the best
employer they ever had--and they stay there forever!"

The boss drove on to the house, which he observed was situated at about
an equal distance from three different railway stations and surrounded
by a piazza with pillars. He walked around it, examining the vines until
his eye caught a torn creeper and a white scratch on the paint. It had
been an outside job after all, and two weeks had already been lost.
Deduction was responsible for a mistake which would not have occurred
had a little knowledge been acquired first. That is the lesson of this
story.

The denouement, which has no lesson at all, is interesting. The
superintendent saw no prospect of getting back the necklace, but before
so informing the client, decided to cogitate on the matter for a day or
two. During that time he met by accident a friend who made a hobby
of studying yeggmen and criminals and occasionally doing a bit of the
amateur tramp act himself.

"By the way," said the friend, "do you ever hear of any 'touches' up the
river or along the Sound?"

"Sometimes," answered the boss, pricking up his ears. "Why do you ask?"

"Why, the other night," replied the friend, "I happened to be meeting my
wife up at the Grand Central about six o'clock and I saw two yeggs that
I knew taking a train out. I thought it was sort of funny. Pittsburgh
Ike and Denver Red."

"When was it?"

"Two weeks ago," said the friend.

"Thanks," returned the boss. "You must excuse me now; I've got an
important engagement."

Three hours later Pittsburgh Ike and Denver Red were in a cell at
headquarters. At six o'clock that evening the necklace had been
returned. This was a coincidence that might not occur in a hundred
years, but had the deductive detective determined the question he would
still be pondering on the comparative probability of whether the cook,
the chore man, or the hired girl was the guilty party.

A clean bit of detection on the part of an agency, and quite in the
day's work, was the comparatively recent capture of a thief who secured
three hundred and sixty thousand dollars worth of securities from a
famous banking institution in New York City by means of a very simple
device. A firm of stock brokers had borrowed from this bank about two
hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a day or two and put up the
securities as collateral. In the ordinary course of business, when the
borrower has no further use for the money, he sends up a certified check
for the amount of the loan with interest, and the bank turns over the
securities to the messenger. In this particular case a messenger arrived
with a certified check, shoved it into the cage, and took away what was
pushed out to him in return--three hundred and sixty thousand dollars in
bonds. The certification turned out to be a forgery and the securities
vanished. I do not know whether the police were consulted or not.
Sometimes in such cases the banks prefer to resort to more private
methods and, perhaps, save the necessity of making a public admission of
their stupidity. When my friend, the superintendent, was called in, the
officers of the bank were making the wildest sort of guesses as to the
identity of the master mind and hand which had deceived the cashier. He
must, they felt sure, have made the forgery with a camel's hair brush of
unrivalled fineness.

"A great artist!" said the president.

"The most skilful forger in the world!" opined another.

"We must run down all the celebrated criminals!" announced a third.

"Great artist-nothing!" remarked the boss, rubbing his thumb over the
certification which blurred at the touch. "He's no painter! Why, that's
a rubber stamp!"

What a shock for those dignified gentlemen! To think that their cashier
had been deceived by a mere, plebeian, common or garden thing of rubber!

"Good-day, gents!" said the boss, putting the check in his wallet. "I've
got to get busy with the rubber stamp makers!"

He returned to his office and detailed a dozen men to work on the East
Side and a dozen on the West Side, with orders to search out every
man in New York who manufactured rubber stamps. Before the end of the
afternoon the maker was found on the Bowery, near Houston Street. This
was his story: A couple of weeks before, a young man had come in and
ordered a certification stamp, drawing at the time a rough design
of what he wanted. The stamp, when first manufactured, had not been
satisfactory to him; and on his second visit, the customer had left a
piece of a check, carefully torn out in circular form, which showed
the certification which he desired copied. This fragment the maker
had retained, as well as a slip of paper, upon which the customer had
written the address of the place to which he wished the stamp sent--The
Young Men's Christian Association! The face of the fragment showed a
part of the maker's signature. The superintendent ran his eye over
a list of brokers and picked out the name of the firm most like the
hieroglyphics on the check. Then he telephoned over and asked to be
permitted to see their pay roll. Carefully comparing the signature
appearing thereon with the Y.M.C.A. slip, he picked his man in less than
ten minutes.

The latter was carefully trailed to his home, and thence to the Young
Men's Christian Association, after which he called on his fiancee at
her father's house. He spent the night at his own boarding place. Next
morning (Sunday) he was arrested on his way to church, and all the
securities (except some that he later returned) were discovered in his
room. More quick work! The amateur's method had been very simple. He
knew that the loan had been made and the bonds sent to the bank. So he
forged a check, certified it himself, and collected the securities. Of
course, he was a bungler and took a hundred rash chances.

A good example of the value of the accumulated information--documentary,
pictorial, and otherwise--in the possession of an agency was the capture
of Charles Wells, more generally known as Charles Fisher, alias Henry
Conrad, an old-time forger, who suddenly resumed his activities after
being released from a six-year term in England. A New York City bank had
paid on a bogus two hundred and fifty dollar check and had reported its
loss to the agency in question. The superintendent examined the check
(although Fisher had been in confinement for six years on the other
side) spotted it as his work. The next step was to find the forger. Of
course, no man who does the actual "scratching" attempts to "lay down"
the paper. That task is up to the "presenter." The cashier of the
bank identified in the agency's gallery the picture of the man who had
brought in the two hundred and fifty dollar check, and he in turn proved
to be another ex-convict well known in the business, whose whereabouts
in New York were not difficult to ascertain. He was "located" and
"trailed" and all his associates noted and followed. In due course he
"connected up" (as they say) with Fisher. Now, it is one thing to follow
a man who has no idea that he is being followed and another to trail a
man who is as suspicious and elusive as a fox. A professional criminal's
daily business is to observe whether or not he is being followed, and he
rarely if ever, makes a direct move. If he wants a drink at the saloon
across the street, he will, by preference, go out the back door, walk
around the block and dodge in the side entrance under the tail of an
ice wagon. In this case the detectives followed the presenter for days
before they reached Fisher, and when they did they had still to locate
his "plant."

The arrest in this case illustrates forcibly the chief characteristic of
successful criminals--egotism. The essential quality of daring required
in their pursuits gives them an extraordinary degree of self-confidence,
boldness, and vanity. And to vanity most of them can trace their fall.
It seems incredible that Fisher should have returned to the United
States after his discharge from prison and immediately resumed his
operations without carefully concealing his impedimenta. Yet when he was
run down in a twenty-six family apartment house, the detectives found in
his valise several thousand blank and model checks, hundreds of letters
and private papers, a work on "Modern Bank Methods," and his "ticket of
leave" from England! This man was a successful forger and because he
was successful, his pride in himself was so great that he attributed his
conviction in England to accident and really felt that he was immune on
his release.

The arrest of such a man often presents great legal difficulties which
the detectives overcome by various practical methods. Of course, no
officer without a search warrant has a right to enter a house or an
apartment. A man's house is his castle. Mayor Gaynor, when a judge, in
a famous opinion (more familiarly known in the lower world even than
the Decalogue) laid down the law unequivocally and emphatically in this
regard. Thus, in the Fisher case, the defendant having been arrested on
the street, the detectives desired to search the apartment of the family
with which he lived. They did this by first inducing the tenant to open
the door and, after satisfying themselves that they were in the right
place, ordering the occupants to get in line and "march" from one room
to another while they rummaged for evidence. "Of course, we had no right
to do it, but they didn't know we hadn't!" said the boss.

But frequently the defendant knows his rights just as well as the
police. On one occasion the same detective who arrested Fisher wanted to
take another man out of an apartment where he had been run to earth. His
mother (aged eighty-two years) put the chain on the door and politely
declined to open it. All the evidence against the forger was inside the
apartment and he was actively engaged in burning it up in the kitchen
stove. In half an hour to arrest him would have been useless! The
detectives stormed and threatened, but the old crone merely grinned at
them. She hated a "bull" as much as did her son. Fearing to take the
law into their own hands, they summoned a detective sergeant from
head-quarters, but, although he sympathized with them, he had read Mayor
Gaynor's decision and declined to take any chances. They then "appealed"
to the cop on the beat, who proved more reasonable, but although he used
all his force, he was unable to break down the door which had in the
meantime been reinforced from the inside. After about an hour, the old
lady unchained the door and invited the detectives to come in. The crook
was sitting by the window smoking a cigar and reading St. Nicholas,
while all evidence of his crime had vanished in smoke.

One more anecdote, at the expense of the deductive detective. A watchman
was murdered, the safe of a brewery blown open and the contents stolen.
Local detectives worked on the case and satisfied themselves that the
night engineer at the brewery had committed the crime. He was a quiet
and, apparently, a God-fearing man, but circumstances were conclusive
against him. In fact, he had been traced within ten minutes of the
murder on the way to the scene of the homicide. But some little link was
lacking and the brewery officials called in the agency. The first thing
the superintendent did was to look over the engineer. At first sight
he recognized him as a famous crook who had served five years for a
homicidal assault! One would think that that would have settled the
matter. But it didn't! The detective said nothing to his associates or
employers, but called on the engineer that evening and had a quiet
talk with him in which he satisfied himself that the man was entirely
innocent. The man had served his time, turned over a new leaf, and was
leading an honest, decent life. Two months later the superintendent
caused the arrest of four yeggmen, all of whom were convicted and are
now serving fifteen years each for the crime.

Thus, the reader will observe that there are just a few more
real detectives still left in the business-if you can find them.
Incidentally, they, one and all, take off their hats to Scotland Yard.
They will tell you that the Englishman may be slow (fancy an American
inspector of police wearing gray suede gloves and brewing himself a dish
of tea in his office at four o'clock), but that once he goes after a
crook he is bound to get him--it is merely a question of time. I may add
that in the opinion of the heads of the big agencies the percentage of
ability in the New York Detective Bureau is high--one of them going
so far as to claim that fifty per cent of the men have real detective
ability--that is to say "brains." That is rather a higher average than
one finds among clergymen and lawyers, yet it may be so.




CHAPTER VII. Women in the Courts


AS WITNESSES

Women appear in the criminal courts constantly as witnesses, although
less frequently as complainants and defendants. As complainants are
always witnesses, and as defendants may, and in point of fact generally
do become so, whatever generalizations are possible regarding women in
courts of law can most easily be drawn from their characteristics as
givers of testimony. Roughly speaking, women exhibit about the same
idiosyncrasies and limitations in the witness-chair as the opposite sex,
and at first thought one would be apt to say that it would be fruitless
and absurd to attempt to predicate any general principles in regard to
their testimony, but a careful study of female witnesses as a whole will
result in the inevitable conclusion that their evidence has virtues and
limitations peculiar to itself.

The ancient theory that woman was man's inferior showed itself in the
tendency to reject, or at least to regard with suspicion, her evidence
in legal matters.

"The following law," says W. M. Best, "is attributed to Moses by
Josephus: 'Let the testimony of women not be received on account of the
levity and audacity of their sex'; a law which looks apocryphal, but
which, even if genuine, could not have been of universal application....
The law of ancient Rome, though admitting their testimony in general,
refused it in certain cases. The civil canon laws of mediaeval Europe
seem to have carried the exclusion much further. Mascardus says:
'Feminis plerumque omnino non creditur, et id dumtaxat, quod sunt
feminae qua ut plurimum solent esse fraudulentre fallaces, et dolosae'
[Generally speaking, no credence at all is given to women, and for this
reason, because they are women, who are usually deceitful, untruthful,
and treacherous in the very highest degree.] And Lancelottus, in his
'Institutiones Juris Canonici,' lays it down in the most distinct
terms, that women cannot in general be witnesses, citing the language of
Virgil: 'Varium et mutabile semper femina'....

"Bruneau, although a contemporary of Madame de Sevigne, did not scruple
to write, in 1686, that the deposition of three women was only equal to
that of two men. At Berne, so late as 1821, in the Canton of Vaud, so
late as 1824, the testimony of two women was required to counterbalance
that of one man.... A virgin was entitled to greater credit than a
widow.... In the 'Canonical Institutions of Devotus,' published at
Paris in 1852, it is distinctly stated that, except in a few peculiar
instances, women are not competent witnesses in criminal cases. In
Scotland also, until the beginning of the eighteenth century, sex was
a cause of exclusion from the witness-box in the great majority of
instances."

Cockburn in his Memoirs tells of an incident during the trial of
Glengarry, in Scotland, for murder in a duel, which is, perhaps,
explicable by this extraordinary attitude: A lady of great beauty
was called as a witness and came into court heavily veiled. Before
administering the oath, Lord Eskgrove, the judge (to whom this function
belongs in Scotland), gave her this exposition of her duty:

"Young woman, you will now consider yourself as in the presence of
Almighty God and of this High Court. Lift up your veil, throw off all
your modesty, and look me in the face."

Whatever difference does exist in character between the testimony of
men and women has its root in the generally recognized diversity in the
mental processes of the two sexes. Men, it is commonly declared, rely
upon their powers of reason; women upon their intuition. Not that the
former is frequently any more accurate than the latter. But our courts
of law (at least those in English-speaking countries) are devised and
organized, perhaps unfortunately, on the principle that testimony not
apparently deduced by the syllogistic method from the observation of
relevant fact is valueless, and hence woman at the very outset is
placed at a disadvantage and her usefulness as a probative force sadly
crippled.

The good old lady who takes the witness-chair and swears that she knows
the prisoner took her purse has perhaps quite as good a basis for her
opinion and her testimony (even though she cannot give a single reason
for her belief and becomes hopelessly confused on cross-examinat

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