The daily Nome industrial worker., 1916-11-14

, yit who SWears positively that it was not Warren K. Billings that depo- sited the suit case. A Sergeant oi Police asked him if he had seen the man who put it there he said he did ''I was never taken by the police or Captain Matheson then put me in charge of Officer Desmond who brought me down to the Stockton boat. the J. D. Peters, actually rail roading and deporting the man who had unfayorable evidence for the prosecution. out of town.
 Then here is Elmer E. Kimberlin who was actually wounded by the flying pieces of the bomb who gives precise. definite and most positive description Of the man with the suit case and whose affidavit concludes with the testimony that aftiant on ! the 22nd day of July. 1916, did not see Warren K. Billings at or near 1 the scene of the explosion at all. ] Finally here was Dan Donaldson who was being treated and paid for dental work, and received a receipt l from Estella Smith who swore that she saw Billings and that herself
 was elsewhere than in the dental office at that time. One witness was promised pardon for her I father being in the penitentiary: an other witness was proved to have perjured himself when MT. and Mrs.
 Mooney were shown to have been
 miles away and not where Brennan
 had had him say they (the Mooneys)
 were; proved up to the hilt in per
 jury by photographs which MNutt compelled the District Attorney, after bitter fight, to surrender to the court. Nothing could be more 1 infamous than the methods of the prosecution and the trial itself was literally travesty upon justice.
 Now comes Bourke Cochran, a lawyer with an international repu' tion. This man after reading the transcript of the evidence in the
 Billings case volunteers to defend the defendants charged with the bomb plot free of charge. Perhaps the most infamous infamy of the whole proceedings is an offer or pardon to Billings if he will only aid in convicting Mooney. Could legal depravity reach more abysmal depths? Here is a man innocent or crime, convicted against the evld- ence and then in the grip of the law the Law would force him to testify against his fellow defendants who. it is admitted by the- prosecu- tion are the men wanted.
 The person who has not subjected the evidence in the Billings case to some consideration will say that the men were tried by jury Of their peers and found guilty. That is the trouble. They were not tried by jury of their peers. They were | tried by professional jurors who | could be relied upon to bring i'll the verdict required and their vacillat- ing plea for mercy shows that they were acting not as the evidence but as the District Attorney desired. It is in such cases that the Jury system is subjected to the most sev- ere test and invariably fails under it. But it is not fair test. The test for the jury system is to be found as the jury system was first recognized in the Anglo-Saxon Juris- prudence: in the Magma Charta. Men are not tried by their peers Their peers mean their equals in class, socially, and their present standing. When are workingmen tried by workingmen? Never at all When have workingmen been asked to try millionaires? Never at all. Politically all men are supposed to be peers in the United States, and before the law, but that is because the law takes no cognizance Of the fact of a definite well defined eco- homie class distinction existing here, just as surely as the nobles and the commons and the yeomen and the minds were distinguished under the rule of John Lackland in the days of Runnymede's famous foregather- ing.