District Attorney Quotes
This is the classic argument given by those who would deny a defendant the Constitutional protection against self-incrimination. The belief that an innocent man has nothing to fear from the police is refuted by the many cases of innocent men being convicted by evidence they have given in the belief that they were innocent, and served long jail sentences only to later be proved by DNA evidence that they could not possibly have been guilty. Since Nott’s day, society has not only found many cases where honest error was made by the police or prosecutors, but many where there was venal prosecutorial misconduct and defendants were jailed even though the authorities were aware of evidence of innocence and kept it secret. There have been a number of these cases where a defendant was on death row and about to be executed when it was found he was innocent. Probably there have been men wrongly executed. See {629444} for a probable example.
There had been a major labor strike in the textile mills of Lawrence. Ettor was one of the major strike leaders and strategists. The city authorities sided totally with the mill owners and used police and militia to try and break the strike. When one of the strikers was shot and killed (historians generally agree that the police had fired the shot), the authorities used the death to incapacitate the leadership of Ettor and two other “socialist” leaders who were professional strike organizers and leaders. The 3 were arrested and charged with murder, firing the shot that killed the striker. Ettor and the others were miles away at the time giving speeches to the strikers at another mill. None-the-less, they were arrested, jailed, and not even tried until after the strike was ended. The three were quickly acquitted. The jailing of the strike leaders backfired and made the strikers even more resolute. The laborers finally won the concessions, not to have their pay cut. The defendants went on to lead other strikes.
The two law enforcement officers had testified that they arrested demonstrators who had “come to break the law” and had not at that point broken any laws.
Marcus Garvey was the best known of the Black leaders of his day. One of his programs for Blacks was to build Black pride by creating a Black owned Steamship Line. He could not get any Bank to finance this enterprise and so he formed his corporation and sold stock in it to Blacks throughout the country. However either Garvey or the people raising the money for him were using illegal means of selling the stock. Du Bois warned his relatives from investing in the Black Star line which went bankrupt as the vessels they bought either sank or floundered. To this day, there are some who believe that the bankruptcy was caused by white establishment harassment of Garvey’s enterprise while other historians believe that while there certainly was white harassment, Garvey’s lack of training and familiarity with the complexities of running a steamship line led to its downfall.
The two defendants were executed. The trial was not only defective as this quotation alleges, but other subsequent investigations showed that there was exculpatory evidence that was withheld by the authorities. This case was one of the lowest points in American jurisprudence. Frankfurter was at the time of this writing a law professor and was appointed. 12 years after this writing, he was appointed to the Supreme Court and served there with distinction for 23 years.
