Popular Law-making: A study of the origin, history, and present tendencies of law-making by statuteStimson, Frederic Jesup
History
Popular Law-making: A study of the origin, history, and present tendencies of law-making by statute
Stimson, Frederic Jesup
Legislation -- United States
Coming to general principles of penology, there is no doubt that of
the three possible theories, revenge, prevention, and reform of the
criminal, it is the latter that in the main prevails throughout the
United States. An investigation was conducted some years since by
correspondence with a vast number of judges throughout the world, and
it proved that this was also their principle of imposing sentences,
in the majority of cases. More radical change is found in that
legislation freeing prisoners on parole, providing indeterminate
sentences, and in the creation of special courts for boys and young
women, with special gaols and reformatories. Jury trial, of course,
remains substantially unchanged from the earlier times, only that the
jurors are now in most States permitted to read or to have read the
newspapers, and that the government has a right of appeal when the
verdict has gone for the prisoner on a point of law. This matter,
upon President Roosevelt's recommendation, was embodied in an act of
Congress.
The legislation making it criminal to advocate assassination or
anarchism has been adverted to when we were considering the rights of
aliens. In England, it is treason to imagine the death of the king.
There is no constitutional reason why it should not be treason to
imagine the death of the president, or perhaps even the subversion by
force of organized society. Such laws have been passed in Washington,
Wisconsin, and other States.
It has, in some States, been made a capital offence to kidnap a child,
and, as has been elsewhere said, the rigor of the common law is very
generally preserved for the crime of rape. The most active effort
to-day for legislation in matters quasi-criminal is that to extend
jury trial over cases of contempt of court, particularly when in
violation of a chancery injunction when the act itself is criminal.
The greatest need of criminal legislation is in the writer's opinion
in matters of business or corporate fraud, and in revival of our older
English law against the extortion or regrating of middlemen, the
engrossing of markets, the artificial enhancing of the prices of the
necessaries of life, and the withholding, destruction, or improper
preservation of food. But most of all, as President Taft has urged,
greater speed and certainty and less technicality in court trials for
crime--a reform of our legal procedure.
XIX
OF THE GOVERNMENTAL FUNCTION, INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS, AND THE PUBLIC
DOMAIN
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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