Convicting the Innocent: Errors of Criminal Justice
by
[Yale University Press, $3.75]
WHETHER Sacco and Vanzetti went into the hereafter as blood-guilty souls or as innocent victims of a jury’s prejudices will remain always controverted. But without any doubt Louise Butler and George Yelder were sent to the penitentiary for a murder which never occurred. How is one sure? Because after the trial and conviction their ’victim’ reappeared, ’hale, hearty, and as black as ever.’ To be sure, witnesses had testified that with their own eyes they saw Topsy killed, her head crushed in, her arms cut off, and her remains, bundled in a sack, thrown into the river by the defendants. Thereafter a few folk regarded her as miraculously resurrected from the dead, but the fact stands that, despite the perjury and the jury’s verdict, Butler and Yelder had committed no crime. Sixty-Four other instances of innocent persons convicted are collated by Mr. Borchard.
The ‘strange credulity of certain members of the legal profession,’their ‘total disqualification as scientific investigators,’ are not unheard of, nor undemonstrated at times; but in these stories is no assertion of unproved opinion. They are set out by a mind trained to analyze circumstance and to evaluate the relation of facts; they tax no one’s credulity, because only one conclusion is possible from the facts slated. Sometimes, they make it evident, innocent men are punished for the crimes of others, or for no crime at all.
These are dangerous stories to set before the careless or the vicarious reader. He forgets the social ineptness and imperfection of normal people who permit punishment, not of 65, but of 65,000 innocent victims of incompetent automobile drivers, and in his criminal law he demands perfection. The killing of innocence he acquiesces in, but he will not tolerate its conviction. To prevent it, now that he is sure it occurs, he may make conviction of the guilty impossible. The attentive reader, however, learns that the fault is in no law which can be corrected, but in the dishonesty of witnesses, the credulity of jurors, the incapacity of lawyers, the indifference of judges — not in the law, but in its administrators. How can the evil be remedied? Wherein must the agents of the law be bettered? The book offers him a problem, difficult and engrossing, whose practicality is apparent, with more data for its solution than usually accompany a social puzzle.
As mere matter of amusement, every devotee of detective stories will delight in these cameos. Should Andrew Toth’s attorney have been keener to realize the inconsistency in the state’s evidence which made Toth’s guilt impossible? How could Dogskin Johnson have unlocked the window and kidnapped Annie Lemberger when the opening in the glass was too small for his hand to enter? And if he did not kill her, as becomes evident, was her own father the murderer who stood silent while Johnson confessed and went to the penitentiary to stay for ten years? Was there really a ‘double’ of Bible-reading Edward Kimball, who worked so ingenious and entertaining a swindle of Funicielo and Elsie, or were the witnesses grossly mistaken, or lying? If Lloyd Prevost did not kill his cousin’s husband, did he have a hand in it? Here are plots and counterplots; detectives, criminals, trial lawyers, in action; not as fiction, but as fact, related by a capable story-teller.
JOHN BARKER WAITE