Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [245]
The clamor is nerve racking. The section before the bench is jammed with policemen, lawyers, bondsmen, reporters, detectives, visitors.... During the entire session the bailiffs constantly rap for order and plead with the mob to move back from the bench....
The smoke is always thick, the noise deafening. People are whispering, laughing, talking, spitting.... Many cases are dismissed for want of prosecution because the complaining witness fails to hear the case called....
In the course of a year approximately twenty-five hundred felony cases pass through this court, along with panhandlers, vagrants, dope victims and dope peddlers, exhibitionists and sensitive and refined persons who have violated traffic laws.... The professional yeggman who is a grave menace to society is given as cursory treatment as the comparatively harmless vagrant picked up when the first snow falls....
Everyone seems to be trying to “get it over with....” The judge seems harrowed beyond endurance.... The prosecutor ... is the most casual person in the room.... Occasionally he barks out an impatient question, usually indicating irritation with the police officer. The latter, ... cynical because he knows that nobody cares whether his case is dismissed or not, is as anxious as the judge to hurry through the formality of a public hearing.3
Yet these courts played an important social role. They handled a volume of cases. They were also the first stop on the road to felony justice. If they were corrupt and neglected, dirty and underfinanced, it was because that was the state of criminal justice in American society: a ramshackle house for the dregs of society. Judging from more recent descriptions—including such novels as The Bonfire of the Vanities—not much has changed since the fifties.
The petty courts have always operated well below the klieg lights of due process. Light began to shine into a few of the chinks of the system during the period of the Great Reform, which reached its highest legal expression in the days of the Warren Court. For years, vagrancy laws had been used to control deviants and undesirables; the general revolt of the underdogs, in the civil rights period, included an attack on these vague and offensive laws. In Wheeler v. Goodman (1969), for example, a federal case out of North Carolina, twelve young people of the type “commonly called ‘hippies,’” who were living together in Charlotte, complained about police harassment. The police used vagrancy laws to arrest and persecute these undesirables. In general, the police used vagrancy laws for dragnet purposes; this was standard practice. But the court struck the law down; it was so vague that it gave no real notice of what the law required; and, what was more, it impinged on human freedom. To be forced to “conform to community behavior patterns is not liberty,” said the court, “but state regimentation.”4dg
The Felony Trial
Trial, especially trial by jury, is what all of us think of when we think of felony procedures. But, in fact, the trial is the residue of a residue: it is a mechanism for handling survivors of a long filtering process. Not all serious criminals are caught; not all those who are caught are arrested; not all those who are arrested are charged; and most of those who are charged never reach trial—their cases are dropped, or they plead guilty.
The Illinois Crime Survey (1929) examined 16,812 cases that entered the system in 1926, in Chicago and a group of Illinois counties. Of those, 43.66 percent were eliminated in preliminary hearings; another 12 percent at the grand jury stage; another 23.66 percent fell by the wayside in the trial court itself—that is, they were dismissed or reduced to misdemeanors. Of the surviving cases, the vast majority turned into