Kansas City Bar Monthly Volume 11 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1909 Excerpt: ...is not only to irritate parties, witnesses and jurors, in particular cases, but to give to the whole community a false notion of the purpose and end of law. Hence comes, in large measure, the modern American race to beat the law. If the law is a mere game, neither the players who take part in it nor the public who witness it can be expected to yield to its spirit when their interests are served by evading it. Thus the courts instituted to administer justice according to law are made agents and abettors of lawlessness." This is going on every day in every part of this land. Judge Amidon, a Federal judge, in an address before the Minnesota Bar Association a few months ago, told this to the assembled lawyers, "Our administration of the criminal law has broken down. It is an unworkable machine. I know we convict men and send them to the penitentiary, but I state it here as a fair statement of the administration of the criminal law in America, that if a man has the means to employ counsel so as to make a fight as we say, in the majority of cases he can escape punishment for crime. The trial can be so protected and enmeshed in such a complication of pleading and evidence as to result in the majority of cases in error which, under this pernicious doctrine of presumed prejudice, will nullify a conviction." I think that we are open to the reproach that of all the callings and professions of this country, the legal profession is the only one that in the last century has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. One turns from the reading of the case of State v. Campbell with the feeling that we have not advanced one step in criminal judicial procedure since the days of Queen Elizabeth. I have shown you what the English indictment is and how since the year...