TRIAL BY LYNCHING

"The best lesson that California has ever given the country." It is worth looking into when the governor of America's most self-conscious state commends rather than apologizes for the ferocious lynching which overtook the murderers of Brooke Hart. Of course, the case was unusual in that it involved no race or class prejudice; it is also to be remembered that the discovery of Hart's body corroborated the confession of the two prisoners. But in making his statement Governor Rolph showed his understanding of one significant fact. The lynching was not simply an act of vengeance, it was a contemptuous dismissal of lawyer-made criminal law; the mob showed its impatience with a legal procedure that makes criminals odds-on favorites over this law with encouraging vigor and finality.

This time there was no Clarence Darrow, no highly paid alienist, no maudlin press, no bribed jury, nor oratorical defense lawyers, and no harassing of bereaved relatives on the witness stand. Thurmond and Holmes were too gulity to be accorded the delightful interlude called American criminal justice. The mob was sick of a system that convicts 299 out of 300 law abiding citizens accused of violating traffic regulations and then refuses to convict 79 out of 30 accused murderers.

All lynchings are a conviction of the legal system under which they exist. Unless the lawyers of the country shake off their professional squeamishness against change the stage will be set for ku kluxers, vigilantes, and "crazed mobs" to step into the breach.

Governor Rolph realizes this, and was not advocating lynch law. A keen observer of popular trends, he was praising a spectacular demonstration of rising public intolerance with an emasculated system of criminal law. The lynching was a challenge to the legal fraternity. It gave them a glimpse of what failure to reform will lead to. It was a crude symptom of a state of intolerance of wrong, an intolerance against ineffectuality on the part of a mechanism originally established for the public good but reduced by changing conditions and technicalities to a mockery.