Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [362]
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Another example was the trial of Clara Fallmer, in Alameda County, California, in 1897. Clara was fifteen years old and pregnant; she shot her lover, Charles LaDue, who refused to marry her. The defense was that she shot her lover “during a state of emotional insanity.” The jury acquitted her.91
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In Wisconsin, the state at first could afford only a log structure at Waupun (1851); but it was equipped with individual cells, each with an iron door that could be transferred to a stone prison when such a prison might be built.28
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In County of Cook v. Chicago Industrial School for Girls (1888), the Illinois Supreme Court dealt the system a serious blow. The Chicago Industrial School, which had no building of its own, had been placing girls in institutions run by the Roman Catholic church; this, the court said, was a violation of the constitution of Illinois, which did not allow public money to go to “sectarian” institutions. After this, the system more or less collapsed. The juvenile court act was passed, as we will see, in 1899.83
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Sometimes the transition from mass to elite movement was fairly obvious. In Montana, in 1863, a cool customer named George Ives had a number of killings to his credit; he was captured, and brought to Alder Gulch, where a crowd decided that his trial “should take place before the miners of the Gulch en masse.” The trial was real enough—Ives even had a defense lawyer—but the upshot was conviction, and a hanging. It was after this event that a group of leading citizens decided to form a vigilance committee, to carry on the “heady struggle between order and crime.”45
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One rusty area, however, was enforcing the laws against gambling and vice. Here, then we do find lay enforcement butting in and something like a “posse” appearing. For example, in the 1880s, Anthony Comstock, fighting the good fight against Satan, and with good reason not to trust the regular law-enforcers, raided gambling establishments in Long Island City with his own men, who had been appointed deputy sheriffs or peace officers for his specific purpose.46
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One check-raising scam was practiced mostly on small-town undertakers. The con man told the undertaker his dear brother had just passed on; he needed a cheap coffin. He paid the undertaker in cash with a large banknote but insisted on a check for his change, so that it could be sent by mail to the grieving family. The con man raised the amount on the (genuine) check, cashed it, and immediately moved on.13
In another scam aimed mainly at lawyers, a young man who passed himself off as the nephew of a prominent lawyer and an agent for the Minneapolis journal “victimized practically all the lawyers in Watertown, S.D., and a number in Brookings, S.D.” He claimed to be tubercular and in need of money to travel to Arizona for his health.14
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Courts and legal scholars were unclear whether a person accused of bigamy could use good-faith belief as a defense.27
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It goes without saying that these statements refer primarily to white men and women; the law paid little respect to chastity, respectability, and choice of identity among blacks; and, especially in the South, the law positively hindered black mobility. Within black society, however, many of the same social norms that ruled white society applied as well.
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Besides public detectives, there were also private detectives. The most successful and famous of these in the nineteenth century was Allan Pinkerton, who founded the detective agency whose logo was an open staring eye. The private detectives worked for private companies (sometimes providing them with strikebreakers) as well as for individuals, investigating crimes (such as embezzlement) or grubbing about in the muck of divorce and infidelity.43
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New York did not get around to this