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By Root 1788 0

justice.be In Philadelphia, hundreds of ordinary people brought their gripes and their quarrels to the local alderman, who dispensed justice (for a fee). A constant parade of troubled and mismanaged lives passed before the bench in these and other lower courts. Allen Steinberg, in his study of Philadelphia, has called the system in the early part of the century a system of private prosecutions:10 complaints that ordinary people brought to their aldermen. The aldermanic courts were an outlet for grievances and troubles, a neighborhood forum; in these courts, the line between civil and criminal cases was blurred. In some ways, a (minor) criminal case was not much more than a civil suit with a government subsidy; people could use the threat of prosecution to wrench out a civil settlement from an unfriendly, irascible, or dishonest opponent. This kind of genteel blackmail had some statutory basis in some states. In New York, for example, when a person was charged with “assault and battery or other misdemeanor, for which the injured party shall have a remedy by civil action,” the victim could appear before a judge, attesting “in writing” that “he has received satisfaction for such injury and damage,” and the judge, “in his discretion,” could then drop the case, with costs.11

In the Philadelphia courts, cases of assault and battery were particularly common. Because the criminal law was “so accessible and pliable,” people used it to “influence the outcome of a private squabble.” The Philadelphia courts acted as a kind of agency of domestic relations. Many of the assault complaints came from battered wives. Some were less serious: Henry Blake’s wife prosecuted him “for refusing to come to bed and making too much noise, preventing her from sleeping.” John Fort’s mother complained that he destroyed the furniture during his drunken binges.12

Even later in the century, when court reform ended the age of private prosecutions in Philadelphia, the petty courts of the city continued to handle hundreds of these domestic quarrels, local feuds, and minor property disputes. But these were not as much “people’s courts” (users’ courts) as they had been; they became more of an instrument of social control, more top-down in their behavior and consequences, more under the thumb of local politicians. One sign of this change was that the proportion of assault and battery cases fell while the number of larceny cases rose.13

Even before these changes, there were grave pockets of injustice in these courts; and, as always, the top-down aspect of the system was toughest on outsiders, nonconformists, the unattached, the poor, the defenseless. Nobody should confuse America in 1800 or 1825 with, say, a modem totalitarian state; the sins of the times were sins of ignorance and blindness, for the most part. But empathy for the downtrodden was often in short supply.

The Oakland police court of the late nineteenth century was not a “place where the ritual and majesty of law hung heavy in the air. The court often did its business in a hurry and with little fuss.”14 Drunks and vagrants, its staples, usually pleaded guilty, or forfeited bail, or were convicted after a short and snappy hearing. In 1881, over 70 percent of all cases were disposed of without trial. No one, or hardly anyone, went scot-free; over the period 1872 to 1910, only 1 percent of the defendants were acquitted in the police court.15 The Oakland Tribune reported in 1884 that Judge Allen “broke a record. . . . At 9 o’clock the court met. At 9:06 the thirteen cases on the docket had been disposed of and one minute after the Judge was on a car bound for Haywards.”16

Occasionally, of course, a defendant pleaded not guilty in the Oakland Police Court. This gave rise to a bench trial. But these trials were perfunctory, to put it mildly. They were little more than a contest between a policeman and the defendant, each swearing to tell the truth. The defendant rarely won. Here is a “case” from 1895, as reported by the Oakland Tribune:

“I didn’t think I was drunk, your Honor,” said Gus Harland this