A Reform in Criminal Procedure. funds and securities, and leaves Batavia for parts unknown. Released at last for lack of a complainant, the merchant demands jus tice. " But I can do no more than release you," says the magistrate, who is pretty well satisfied that the Englishman has been the victim of procedure. "And can I do nothing more?" asks the merchant. " Not so far as appears," says the justice, "unless you can catch your departed agent." " And what do you call this sort of thing? " queries the merchant. " My dear friend," the justice closes, " This is the law of arrest!" This sketch is founded on fact; probably it was a fact that came to Bulwcr's knowl edge. Such events constantly happen. In December, 1892, a lawyer in good standing at the New York Bar was arrested at his office on the complaint of a woman, for whom he had brought an action to recover the sum of five thousand dollars from an in surance company. Three thousand of this he had already collected, and the suit for two thousand was pending. He had paid over two thousand to the plaintiff; and while no reasonable person would deny that this lawyer might consider a thousand dollars as a competent fee for the entire action, yet the fact that the plaintiff did not share this opinion caused him to be taken from his vo cation, deprived of his liberty and arraigned before a police justice on a charge of grand larceny. Now if the fair, or unfair, plaintiff chooses to remove to some place outside of the state or county, and not appear at the trial before a competent court, what measure of justice can this defendant obtain? An acquittal? No. Merely a dismissal of the in dictment, leaving the cloud of an indictment upon his reputation; dismissed indeed, but liable to be revived at the instance of the District Attorney at any time during the statutory period of ensuing years, a dismissal being a bar to an action on a misdemeanor only, and not on a felony. The general public is apt to believe that an arrest and an indictment are prima facie
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evidences of guilt. As a matter of fact they bear the same relation to actual guilt that a casual cough bears to a deadly pulmonary consumption. From among each hundred persons arrested and brought before a police magistrate, twenty are discharged on the complainant's own showing. When the papers in the cases of the remaining eighty are laid before the grand jury, bills of in dictment are found against fifty. Of these fifty, ten are never tried, because complain ants fail to appear; of the forty, presumably the guiltiest of the hundred, twenty are ac quitted. These ratios are not claimed to be strictly accurate, but they are the result of a long study of criminal records in the city of New York, and are closely aligned to truth. Out of a hundred accused persons, at least in the County of New York, it is a question if twenty eventually work out sen tences in the penitentiary or state prison. On the face of it then, the chances are five to one that a person, not belonging to the criminal classes, arrested on a criminal charge, is innocent; and if this is the case, or if the probabilities in his favor are only three to one, the public should be educated to a larger charity toward ac cused persons, and a suspension of judgment, if not a belief in their innocence, so long as the defendants remain unconvicted. Such a tolerance would be the first step in the direction of the great reform in procedure which this article is intended to advocate. In fact there are so many conditions all working together to assist the mischievous designs of frivolous, insincere, and perjured complainants, that common justice demands that at the end of the procedure an innocent accused person should be able to command, as a matter of right, an absolute vindication; such a vindication as will restore him to society with unblemished reputation. Mag istrates are only human; and police justices as a class are not selected from among the most able jurists, or even the best educated and most responsible laymen. When a complain
