A Mob Hanged Two Men at the Courthouse. Then the State Argued Over the Bill.
After Hill and Parker were lynched in Colfax, Attorney General W. C. Jones ruled that the county need not pay for a coroner's inquest—and said the real hunt for the mob belonged to a grand jury.
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.
Olympia, Jan. 17.—Special.—The lynching of Hill and Parker in Whitman county, an affair which shocked the entire state, is again brought to notice by the following official communication from Attorney General Jones:
Olympia, Wash., Jan. 18, 1895.
Hon. H. W. Canfield, Prosecuting Attorney, Whitman County, Colfax, Wash.
Dear Sir: I am in receipt of a communication from D. H. Shaw, esq., coroner of Whitman county, asking me to advise him with respect to the legality of the action of the county commissioners in refusing to allow the cost bill for holding an inquest upon the bodies of Hill and Parker, who were hung by a mob in Colfax, the county commissioners having refused to allow the bill on the ground that the inquest was unnecessary.
As I am not authorized to advise officially any county officer, except the county attorney, I address this communication to you.
I desire to call your attention especially to section 216, vol. I, Hill's Code, which provides as follows: 'When information is given to any coroner that the body of any person is found the cause of whose death is unknown, and there shall exist reasonable grounds for the belief that such death has been caused by unlawful means at the hands of another, he shall go to the place where the body is, and forthwith summon six good and lawful persons,' etc.
It will be observed by the reading of this section that three things must occur before the coroner is authorized to hold an inquest.
First—That the body of some person is found.
Second—That the cause of the death of such person is unknown.
Third—That there exist reasonable grounds for the belief that such death has been caused by unlawful means at the hands of another.
I believe that the word 'found' as necessarily implied in this section and applied to the body of a deceased person means something more than that his body should be seen by some persons after a notorious hanging by a mob. It implies something in the nature of an unlooked-for discovery, and the mere fact that the bodies of Hill and Parker were seen dangling from the front portico of the Whitman county courthouse, after the mob had disbanded and left the city, is not in my judgment a finding of the bodies within the meaning of this law.
But whatever may be said as to the meaning of the word 'found' as implied in this section, there is no excuse for saying that the cause of death of these men was unknown. Everybody knew that these men were hung by a mob and a case was presented for an investigation, not by a coroner's jury, but either by a grand jury or the prosecuting attorney, an investigation not for the purpose of passing upon the cause of death of these men, but an investigation for the purpose of finding out who were the perpetrators of the crime.
I have taken the trouble to call your attention thus fully to this matter for the reason that the practice of summoning coroner's juries and holding inquests in cases wholly unwarranted by law has become a serious wrong in this state. It is a practice which has entailed thousands of dollars of unnecessary expense upon the people of the state, and in cases where the inquest was not warranted by law, the result has been usually rather to embarrass the proper officers of the law in subsequently ferreting out and punishing the criminals, than in aiding them to do so.
Several years ago I called the attention of every prosecuting attorney in this state to this matter by circular letter and this seems to be a fitting time to repeat the admonition then given.
Inquests have been repeatedly held in cases where there was not a scintilla of evidence to justify even a suspicion that the deceased had come to his death otherwise than by entirely natural causes, by suicide, or by accident for which nobody was to blame. It is too often assumed that a coroner's inquest is held for the purpose of trying somebody for crime or exonerating some one from the suspicion of a crime. I do not deem this to be the purpose of such an investigation.
When the body of a human being is found, a Christian civilization demands that the living should attend to giving it an immediate and decent burial, but when the surrounding circumstances justify a suspicion that the death is the result of a crime justice demands that before one of the chief evidences of the crime, if one has been committed, is by burial practically destroyed for the purposes of evidence, an immediate examination should take place under the forms of law, to ascertain whether the suspicions are well grounded; and the law has provided the coroner's jury for this purpose and as I conceive it for this purpose alone.
It is needless to say that I heartily approve of the action of the county commissioners of Whitman county in this case.
Very respectfully yours,
W. C. Jones,
Attorney General.
“Everybody knew that these men were hung by a mob and a case was presented for an investigation, not by a coroner's jury, but either by a grand jury or the prosecuting attorney.”
The letter turns the aftermath of a lynching into a dispute over jurisdiction and public expense—an uncomfortable echo of how official systems can treat violence as a procedural problem. The question it raises, who investigates a killing and who pays for that investigation, remains central to accountability today.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.