The San Francisco call., 1898-01-07
REFORM THE CRIMINAL CODE.

| toriety and the vicisstudes and changes which
 it has undergone have been dramatic that it may be made to serve purpose besides that of satisfying the unwholesome taste for the morbid and abnormal.
 For nearly three years some phase of this case has been before the public. Of that necessity which cannot be avoided, it has been in some form in every newspaper In some of them, however, it has appeared with unnecessary frequency, or has been written up so as to wiring from every possible ab- normal and crime breeding suggestion of which 1t was capable It has been used in pictures and text by such papers with ingenuity sometimes helllsh to touch into diseased and dreadful activity any germs of erotic crime that might be latent Tn the community. These papers have reveled in the spume and fecuence and foulness of it and have scattered broadcast every suggestion which can serve as a mental ferment for the perversion and undoing of the weak and wayward. The has been made to be moral pestience, psychopathic infection, incapable of being quarantined and against which no lustration could prevail long the sensational press had the of paradng 1t as news because of its constant recurrence in the courts.
 Observing this, those members of the community who have noted the spread of moral gangrene losing their judgment, have accused the courts of being the septic centers of the contagion, and the
 
 other matter made the subject of judicial inves- tgation has inflicted as much harm in the form of damage to morals and loss of respect due to the courts as this. Therefore, before the lesson passes and is overgrown by some other grewsome sensa- ton let the only possible vrtuous be made of it, The courts not to blame. They created to administer the civil and criminal code The rights of a accused of crime begin in the Fed eral constitution and lie embedded in the statutes These being constitutional the courts are bound by them. If lawyer choose to use his case an ad- vertisement of his aptness in getting time, gaining delay and baking justice in labyrinth of techni- calities, armed with the Criminal Code he has the courts at his mercy. He has also the admiration of certain section of the community if his be capital and capital punishment be hanging. So it happens that not only in California, but in other States, justice lags The tenderness shown by the law for the innocent, falsely accused, has erected system of statutes and produced line of decisions which render punishment of the guilty difficult and tedious
 Those who make it their business to decry and defame the Federal have fed their grudge on the Durrant case But those courts cannot bar the presentation of before them, nor they in the first instance, if Federal question be alleged prevent an appeal to test its existence.
 Without at present pointing out the particulars in which amendments to the statutes may be had, call attention the need of such statutory re- form will repress crime by its prompt punish ment rather than encourage it by delays which the innocent do not need but which avail the guilty in various ways and recruit the criminal ranks by sug- geston.
 The ends of justice and the ends of morality to be served by such reform In not single aspect is crime desirable presence. Neither in repen- tance in punishment does 1t teach. "The way of the transgressor is hard" may be written on the lintel of every prison and carved every galows, and yet that way will be trodden to the end by those who believe themselves exceptions to the hard rule that has dominated those gone before in the same path
 1 Moral diseases have their origin in pathogenc germs certainly do physical disorders. We ex- pend large in the sanitation of our cities the destruction of foul and noisome things and in a proper drainage and dsinfection of sewage that the germs of fever may be prevented.
 The purpose of the Criminal Code should largely be moral sanitation Give the wrongly accused opportunity to prove his innocence, but when udg- ment has fallen upon the guilty put the noisome matter away; get 1t out of sight and out of mind and thereby purify and keep clean the minds in which the subtlest of natural laws has Lodged the capacity to catch disorders by contact