Replies

"f there were some way that everyone who ever broke a law were to be caught, convicted, and given the punishment prescribed by law we would be forced to simply declare the entire country a prison because we would all be going inside and the last judge would be forced to sentence himself and slam the door behind his own rear end. If you think I am exaggerating you simply are not aware of the true situation in "the land of the free"!

The U.S. Attorney General Robert H. Jackson, later a Justice of the US Supreme Court, delivered a speech in 1940 in which he said:

"With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some sort on the part of almost anyone," declared Jackson, who later became a Supreme Court justice. "In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who committed it, it is a question of picking the man, and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him."

The U.S. Attorney General Robert H. Jackson, later a Justice of the US Supreme Court, delivered a speech in 1940 in which he said:

"With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some sort on the part of almost anyone," declared Jackson, who later became a Supreme Court justice. "In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who committed it, it is a question of picking the man, and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him."

Exactly, and you cannot imagine how much more this statement is justified today than when Mr. Jackson said it in 1940. When I was just a boy watching the Art Linkletter show "People are Funny" there was one episode in which Linkletter sent a man from the audience out into the street and told him that if he could spend the rest of the show outside the studio and not violate any laws that he would be given one hundred dollars at the end of the show. That was a large sum in those days but the man did not get the money. At the conclusion of the show he came back in and the cameraman who had followed him gave an account of everything the man had done. He had opened a pack of cigarettes while standing on the street and had failed to break the tax stamp at the top of the pack which was a violation of law in those days. Now, it is extremely doubtful that anyone was ever arrested for not breaking that stamp but it does illustrate what Mr. Jackson meant.