Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [367]
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A “jack-roller” was a man “who robs his fellows, while they are drunk or asleep.”82
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There were six of these: murder, kidnapping for ransom or where the victim was harmed, armed robbery, rape, treason, and aircraft hijacking.
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Also on the list: multiple murder, or a previous conviction for murder; and situations in which the murder was “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel, manifesting exceptional depravity.” In People v. Superior Court of Santa Clara County,98 the California Supreme Court declared this particular clause unconstitutional. It was too vague; its terms did not meet “the standards of precision and certainty required” for a death-penalty statute.
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In California, Supreme Court judges run for office unopposed; the issue for voters is yes or no for continuing them in their positions. When the voters did say no, vacancies were created that the governor could fill by appointment.
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Some states passed their own versions of the white slave laws. In Montana, there was the so-called Donlan White Slave Act which prohibited the “importation” of women into Montana, or their “exportation,” for “immoral purposes.” In 1915, the Donlan act snared one J. E. Reed, who ran an employment agency in Butte, Montana. He had offered Dorothy Burger, aged seventeen, a job as a waitress in a hotel in Diamondville, Wyoming, for thirty dollars a month, plus room and board. Diamondville, according to the court, was a “mining camp consisting largely of Italians and Austrians.” Reed bought a ticket for Dorothy, and told her “the place was a sporting-house, and that her duties would be to dance, play cards, drink beer, and entertain men.” She told this to a woman friend, who went right to the chief of police. At the trial, there was evidence that “the place was not one where a girl could live for any length of time and be respectable.” The defendant knew that the “chief desideratum” at the hotel was “good-lookers” rather than “efficient cooks and waitresses.” Reed was convicted, but the conviction was reversed because the judge had given the jury too broad a definition of “immoral”14
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Note that this is a civil rather than a criminal statute. Its goal, of course, was punitive; and since the whole area of vice regulation and suppression has historically been within the domain of criminal justice, the statute must be mentioned here.
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In Philadelphia, in 1915, the Municipal Court heard 640 complaints concerning fornication and bastardy. But there was a simple reason for this: in order to get child support, an “unmarried mother” had to bring a criminal suit against the father, “and establish his legal identity as a violator of the law against fornication and bastardy.” If the father was a married man, the charge was adultery. But the men were, in fact, almost never prosecuted for this offense. The penalty for adultery was imprisonment, which “would defeat the purpose of the bastardy proceedings.”34
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Jennie’s mother first claimed Jennie had been raped while unconscious; this charge was groundless, and she shifted to the assertion that Jennie was “weak-minded.” Di Santos went free, but only after a long and costly ordeal.
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In 1922, Mrs. Nellie Stermer-Koulik was indicted for mass poisoning in Chicago. Justice Harry Olson of the Municipal Court was horrified to read a report that her “mental age” was eleven, that she had a feebleminded son, and two other sons in jail. If a “eugenics expert” had found out the “history of this whole family at the time one moron was discovered,” said Judge Olson, it would have been possible to keep an eye on this woman,