Salt Lake evening Democrat. [volume] (Salt Lake City, Utah) 1885-1887, 1886-09-20
PERVERTING THE LAW.

! PREVENTING The LAW.
A Colorado dispatch quotes Chief JUS
tice Waite, now at Colorado Springs, as
saying in answer to a newspaper mans
questions, that as the Chicago Anarchists
were tried and convicted under the laws
of the State of Illinois, he did not see how
their counsel could obtain footing for
their cases in the United States Supreme
Court. "They would have to show, ="
said the Judge, in substance, "that their
constitutional rights were infringed on,
and not being citizens, they cannot do
that" All men who have given any
thought to the subject, knew this to be
so without the opinion of Judge Waite to
guide them, but the tendency to use the
machinery of the law, in aid of convicted
criminals, by the legal profession, has
caused deep fear in the breasts of law
abiding men, who look to see the swift
punishment of the Chicago miscreants,
and many of them feared some chance of
escape for the murderers lay in the ac-
ton of the United States Supreme Court
The case brings up the frequency of late,
with which the most noted criminals
have been engineered out of punishment
by crafty legal acumen, and how different
it used to be in such cases, where after a
man had fair trial by jury, such action
was looked upon as an affront to
both court and jury, and the pro-
fession was very chary how it
proceeded. The following from an
editorial in the New York Tribune, writ
ten by Horace Greeley during the pro-
gress of the Tweed trials, shows how
such work was viewed by the great
writer, and what he wrote then is more
than applicable now, in view of the
efforts being made to release these con-
victed murderous assassins: There once
was, ages ago, a time when it was con-
sidered base and detestable for a man to
sell for money to the most scandalous of
criminals and the most impudent of
cheats, his countenance, his intimacy,
his friendship, the utmost efforts of all
his talents, skill and learning to save a
villain from the gallows, or the prison
which his crimes had richly merited. or
to enable him to cheat some widow or
orphan out of their patrimony and live
lihood. This romantic and antiquated
sense of decency and self-respect has,
however, long since disappeared. For
lawyers to league themselves for money
with the most consumate of scoundrels,
to become, as it were, accessories
after the fact to the greatest
of crimes and villainies by their paid la
bors in shielding the perpetrators from
detection and punishment, or from being
obliged to disgorge their dishonest gains
all this has become a regular business
transaction, and the lawyer shares the
spoils of the murderer and robber, and
pockets the fee stained with the blood or
wet with the tears of some wretched vic
tim of fraud or force from whom his
client had just before extorted it, with no
less satisfaction than he puts into his
pocket the last dollar of the poor, deluded
victim who, having been plundered or
cheated of the greater part of his property
by some unprofessional rogue, spends the
miserable remnant of it in vain and de-
ceptive pursuit of legal redress" The
foregoing is, of course, too sweeping,
and is unjust to the great body
of gentlemen who champion the wrongs
of the world before the courts of justice,
but there are some men in the profession
who seek notoriety by freeing scoundrels
on technicalities, and who never consider
any other side of the case than the one
which presents their personal gain.
Campbell did it in the Berner case, in
Cincinnati, which resulted in riot and the
pillage of that city by the outraged
populace, and if it should prove success
full in the case of the Chicago murderers,
the result would be so bloody and the
riot and ruin so far-reaching, that no man
would again dare to thwart the will of
the people either in the name of law or
with it. Let us hope that no such per-
verting of the law can succeed in this
case.