Fifty Murders, Not One Hanging: Seattle Puts Its Courts on Trial
A Post-Intelligencer editorial argues that endless technical appeals have made King County a place where killers walk free — and warns that the resulting public fury is the courts' own fault.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Judge Cooley, in his recent address before the American Bar Association, set forth in very strong language the utter folly and crime of lynch law. The New York Evening Post indorses every word of Judge Cooley's address, but adds that the courts are something to blame for these popular outbreaks against law and order. In several states murderers are suffered to escape the gallows through some technicality, or the execution of the sentence is delayed so long that the edge of the ax of justice is blunted. Justice should be not only sure, but also swift, to impress the people.
In our own state there have been some shameful miscarriages of justice; notably that of Friedrichs. The granting of the appeal of Nordstrom to the United States supreme court is a recent event that increases popular impatience with the tedious delays of the courts. It is a notorious fact that the United States supreme court has regularly thrown out of court all such appeals from the state courts on the ground that it has no jurisdiction. It is absolutely certain that the appeal of Nordstrom will meet the same fate, and yet our young supreme court grants this appeal from a man concerning whose guilt there is no doubt and whose appeal is based on a mere technicality.
The courts are bound to make justice swift as well as sure, if they expect to maintain reverence for the administration of criminal justice. Nobody doubted the guilt of Friedrichs; nobody doubted the guilt of Nordstrom, but Friedrichs has escaped the gallows. There have been fifty cold-blooded murders in this county within the last ten years, and not one of these murderers has suffered death for his crime. Of course lynch law is no remedy for this shameful state of things; lynch law does not cure crime, because it is a crime in itself. Nevertheless the people are not wholly to blame for their lawlessness; the courts, as the New York Evening Post points out, are greatly to blame for abusing their powers and opportunities by granting a murderer, concerning whose guilt there is no doubt, appeal after appeal on mere technical grounds. The public has rights as well as the convict.
“There have been fifty cold-blooded murders in this county within the last ten years, and not one of these murderers has suffered death for his crime.”
This 1894 editorial is a prototype of every modern fight over criminal justice: the tension between procedural rights and swift punishment, and the charge that courts are too soft on the guilty. Its dark insinuation — that if the courts won't act, the mob might — is a warning that still lands today, when debates over bail, appeals and 'technicalities' remain live in Seattle and beyond.
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