The New York Tombs Inside and Out!: Scenes and Reminiscences Coming Down to the Present. A Story Stranger Than Fiction, with an Historic Account of America's Most Famous Prison.Munro, John Josiah
History
The New York Tombs Inside and Out!: Scenes and Reminiscences Coming Down to the Present. A Story Stranger Than Fiction, with an Historic Account of America's Most Famous Prison.
Munro, John Josiah
Crime -- New York (State) -- New York; Halls of Justice (New York, N.Y.)
There is no way to ascertain the number of innocent persons indicted,
but if my judgment is correct the total is not small. How could it be
otherwise, when the Grand Jury goes through its business in such a
hurry. It should be observed also that the Grand Jurors themselves are
not competent authorities in criminal law, and when efficiency in the
work of prosecution is measured rather by the total number of persons
indicted than by the percentage of those sent to prison, the weakness of
the system becomes apparent.
The fault does not lie with the Grand Jury or with the District
Attorney; it is with the system. The Grand Jury simply does as did other
grand juries and the District Attorney does as did his predecessors.
To show that the Grand Jury as now constituted is unqualified to find
indictments in a large number of crimes, I need only mention three cases
which must have cost the County of New York in the neighborhood of
millions of dollars, which if they had come originally before a Board of
Criminal Experts, certainly never would have gone to trial on the weak
indictments that sent all of the three defendants to the Death House.
The first was that of Maria Barberi, who was convicted of the murder of
her sweetheart, Dominico Catalonica, July, 1895.
Catalonica had greatly wronged this woman, and then refused to marry
her. While suffering under great mental excitement, after she found
herself ruined and disgraced, and forever cast aside, she killed him.
Although insane when she committed the deed, she nevertheless was tried
and convicted and sentenced to the Electric Chair, but the Court of
Appeals gave her a new trial. When all the facts came out at the second
trial, she was justly acquitted.
The second case was that of Roland B. Molineux. He was indicted for the
murder of Mrs. Adams in 1899. A board of trained experts, having two
lawyers and physicians never would have convicted him, as there was no
legal evidence to convict him of such a crime. He was convicted mainly
on the evidence of _paid_ handwriting experts. Doubtless, a hundred
other persons might have been indicted for the same offense. At the
second trial he was acquitted.
The third case was that of Albert T. Patrick, who was jointly indicted
with Jones for the murder of William M. Rice. This is said to have been
one of the strangest criminal cases that ever was tried in a Court of
Justice. Nothing was done until Jones turned State’s evidence; then he
said that he killed Millionaire Rice at the suggestion of Patrick, with
chloroform. Patrick was convicted of murder in the first degree, and
Jones allowed to go scot free. Since then, nine hundred reputable
physicians have come forward and said in a petition to Governor Higgins
for a pardon that Rice could not have been killed with chloroform. After
being four years in the Death House, the Governor commuted Patrick’s
sentence to life imprisonment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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