Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls; Or, War on the White Slave Trade
History
Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls; Or, War on the White Slave Trade
Prostitution
It is this section of the Act under which the prosecutions in the
Northern District of Illinois were instituted by United States District
Attorney Sims in June of nineteen hundred and eight, and which resulted
in the imprisonment of so many procurers and keepers of houses of
ill-fame. Among the cases which were tried before a jury and which
resulted in a conviction of the keepers, was a case entitled United
States v. Keller and Ullman. These defendants were charged with having
harbored Irene Bodi, a native of Austria, within three years after she
had entered the United States, and found guilty by the jury and
sentenced to imprisonment in the penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth for
one and one-half years each. They thereupon prosecuted an appeal to the
Supreme Court of the United States, alleging among other things that the
law under which they were convicted was unconstitutional, in that the
clause "keep, maintain, control, support, or harbor," attempted to
embrace powers not given by the constitution to Congress, but reserved
to the respective states and to be within their police powers. This
contention was upheld by the Supreme Court. The result is that so much
of Section 3 of the Act of February 20, 1907, as attempted to prosecute
a keeper who simply harbored or permitted to be within his house of
prostitution an alien woman or girl within three years after her arrival
in this country was wiped out of the statute, and the section of the Act
must now be read as follows:
Sec. 3. That the importation into the United States of any alien woman
or girl for the purpose of prostitution, or for any other immoral
purpose, is hereby forbidden; and whoever shall, directly or indirectly,
import, or attempt to import, into the United States, any alien woman or
girl for the purpose of prostitution, or for any other immoral purpose,
or whoever shall hold or attempt to hold any alien woman or girl for any
such purpose in pursuance of such illegal importation, shall, in every
such case, be deemed guilty of a felony, and on conviction thereof be
imprisoned not more than five years and pay a fine of not more than five
thousand dollars; and any alien woman or girl who shall be found an
inmate of a house of prostitution or practicing prostitution, at any
time within three years after she shall have entered the United States,
shall be deemed to be unlawfully within the United States and shall be
deported as provided by sections twenty and twenty-one of this Act.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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