A Web of Extortion in Seattle
A defense attorney alleges police and lawyers conspired to coerce a fourteen-year-old girl into testifying against her own stepfather.
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.
Seattle, Wash. — Sensational charges against two well-known Seattle lawyers and several members of the Seattle police department are covertly made in an affidavit filed in the superior court today by Walter A. Keene, attorney for Ezumida, the Japanese lodging house keeper, who is accused of criminally assaulting Yona Ezumida, his own step-daughter, a girl 14 years of age. By means of the affidavit, Attorney Keene procured from Judge Bell an order allowing him to subpoena the girl, the prosecuting witness herself, as a witness in Ezumida's behalf. Attorney Keene charges in his affidavit that he has in his possession a typewritten copy of a confession made by the girl in the presence of a stenographer, D. C. Kennedy, and other witnesses, in which she absolutely absolves her stepfather and states that she was induced to file the charges and testify against Ezumida by two lawyers and two members of the police department, whom she says she believes to have conspired to extort money from Ezumida. The lawyers who are referred to in Keene's affidavit are Thomas D. Page and S. M. Shipley, as Keene himself admits. Attorney Page denied the charge in toto.
“She was induced to file the charges and testify against Ezumida by two lawyers and two members of the police department, whom, she says, she believes to have conspired to extort money.”
This case highlights the historical intersection of racial prejudice and systemic corruption within the Pacific Northwest justice system. Accusations of police-led extortion against immigrant families remain a potent topic in contemporary civil rights discourse.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.