The Price of a Knife Fight
A violent altercation between two sailors leaves a man hospitalized and the community frustrated with a light jury verdict.
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.
Two sailors, living in those miserable rookeries in the rear of the county jail, got into a dispute Thursday night over the sale of a cabin and called each other hard names. Finally, they came to blows, and Harmon Marty stabbed Powell Hank in the thigh with a pocket-knife, inflicting a wound an inch and a half long and two inches deep. Mr. Mills, who chanced to be in the vicinity, arrested Marty and chained him to a lamp-post while Hank was being conveyed to the hospital. Marty was afterwards locked in jail and was tried yesterday before Justice Vrooman on a charge of assault and battery. The jury, after five minutes' deliberation, brought in a verdict of 'not guilty.' Marty is a young man, a German, 23 years of age, and a sailor, and from what the writer can gather, he is a 'hard case' who has publicly made threats against certain persons in this community. This cutting business must be stopped. If the law will not reach such cases, some method will be devised that will reach them and bring the guilty parties to justice.
“It has been truly said that 'the verdict of a jury is past finding out.'”
This 1883 account reflects early Seattle's rough-and-tumble street justice and the deep-seated public frustration with inconsistent legal outcomes, a sentiment that resonates with modern debates regarding public safety, legal accountability, and the cycle of violence in urban spaces.
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