The True Crime by Wenzell Brown & Martin M. Frank

Author:Wenzell Brown & Martin M. Frank
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, detective, crime, teenagers, gang
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2016-11-13T16:00:00+00:00

DIARY OF A D.A., by Martin M. Frank

By Way Of Introduction

This is not a conventional diary, since it does not lead the reader on a day by day excursion into the inner recesses of a man’s mind and being. It is, rather, a personally conducted tour, by one who lived it through a sixteen-year experience in an unusual calling—unusual, because in the well-known vocations that engage the labors of Americans, few people, comparatively, have been prosecutors.

From my years as an assistant district attorney, devoted to the prosecution of more than three thousand defendants charged with crime, I have culled the essentials and gleaned the highlights for this portrayal. In addition to many cases that fell to me, I describe some that were the responsibility of my associates. But detailing of the routine drudgery that constitutes a large part of the work of a prosecutor has been omitted, for it is no more possible for me to animate the humdrum than to breathe life into a wooden Indian.

Crime, criminals, and their prosecution and punishment, have, from the day Cain slew Abel and the Supreme Law Enforcer dealt with the first fratricide, provoked the interest, aroused the passions, and puzzled the minds of men. Because tales of dark deeds are quick to catch attention and stark sensationalism is easily marketable, accuracy, which is always essential, no longer seems required. So much that we read, hear, and view is blatantly false and misleading, not only as fiction but as alleged truth, that almost universally there is an unwholesome, blurred, and distorted conception of the whole subject of law enforcement. That picture will perhaps never be clarified, unless the public becomes more knowingly critical, and irresponsible merchants of what is banal and lurid grow more scrupulously dependable.

Actually, most fabrications of criminal exploits only feebly match the drama, the pathos, and the grim tragedies that the weak, the greedy, the vicious, and the depraved themselves in reality create. Few will disagree that compared to George Cvek, Bluebeard was a dilettante, or that the abduction of Proserpine by Pluto, foul deed though it was, held none of the horror that befell the families of the Lindbergh and Greenlease children.

I believe that the lapse of time since my elevation to the bench enables me to view the functioning of the district attorney’s office with an objectivity that is focused in sharp perspective. Some of my opinions are contrary to those popularly held. To dispel any inference that they are colored by political partisanship, I hasten to attest that in 1951 I was elected a Justice of the Supreme Court after a dual nomination by the Republican and Democratic parties. However, to ignore the subject of politics in an account of the conduct of a public office would be like stitching a coat without thread, so there will be candid expression of their affinity. The term “politician” has so long had a disreputable connotation, not entirely undeserved, that its etymological definition, “One skilled…in government,” may no longer be retrievable.

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