My Six Convicts by Donald Powell Wilson

Author:Donald Powell Wilson [Wilson, Donald Powell]
Language: dan
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Other evils affecting the convict are stool pigeons, false arrests, bail bonds and fixed sentences — rackets which go hand-in-hand in most large cities in a sorry parade of justice. While there are not many innocent men in the penitentiary, the prisoner's frequent complaint, 'I been framed,' cannot be too quickly dismissed. Easy preys to false arrest and casual conviction without trials are convicts like Weary Willie and 'I.Q.33' whom Scott turned up in his testing. These are sometimes picked up by the police as a convenient way to close a case lingering on the blotter, and the convict finds himself in prison before he knows what has happened. Sanford Bates, the first superintendent of the Bureau of Prisons formed in 1930, himself reports the case of an ignorant mountain boy whose conviction was railroaded by a Federal marshal after getting the boy to 'plead guilty to not doing it' on the day the revenuers raided a still. 'Ah jes pleaded guilty to not bein' dar, but heah ah is.' One estimate claims that nearly one-third of a prison population is serving time for offences they did not technically commit. They are in on false charges. Either the offender agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge in exchange for a fixed sentence, or he was actually framed by a police stool pigeon; that is, a stool pigeon in the employ of the police.

The procuring of a fixed sentence is called bargaining. If the district attorney's office knows its case is weak, it assures its conviction records by throwing a scare into the offender, urging him to plead guilty to a lesser offence in return for a lighter fixed sentence and thus avoid coming to trial. This sounds good to the uninitiated. The offence may be one that the offender actually did commit in the past, or it may represent an unsolved case on the police blotter. Sometimes it is one which is concocted on the spot. The offence to which the man pleads guilty may not even be in the same category as his actual crime.

This procedure accomplishes several things. It increases the conviction records of the district attorney and those of the police department. The offender gets off with a lighter pre-agreed sentence, and often the fixing attorney and all concerned are the richer. A notorious case of this kind involved a highjacker who looted a truck of $30,000 worth of silk. The charge was armed robbery, subject to a sentence of ten years to life. The highjacker pleaded guilty to petty larceny, was fined one dollar and given one year in prison.

Al Capone, when he was finally apprehended, bargained for an eighteen-month sentence on a rum-running charge and expected never to come to trial. He might never have served the seven of his ten-year sentence, if he had not prematurely and publicly boasted of the fix, thus forcing the judge's hand.

A major stumbling block in the way of a convict's developing a respect for the law is society's approval of the stool pigeon.

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