1. For example, Criminal Justice in Cleveland, the report of a survey of the administration of justice in that city, under the general direction and edited by Roscoe Pound and Felix Frankfurter, published in 1922; see also the Illinois Crime Survey (1929).

2. Friedman, Lawrence M. and Percival, Robert V., The Roots of Justice: Crime and Punishment in Alameda County, California, 1870-1910 (1981) does, however, reach into the twentieth century.Google Scholar

3. Payne, Stephen M., Santa Clara County: Harvest of Change (1987), 151.Google Scholar

4. California Statistical Abstract (1990), 13.

5. Payne, Santa Clara County, 65.

6. Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Population, 23.

7. Sawyer, Eugene, History of Santa Clara County (1922), 161, 309.Google Scholar The population of San Francisco in 1920 was about half a million; the population of Oakland was about 215,000. Vance, James, Jr., Geography and Urban Evolution in the San Francisco Bay Area (1964), 45.Google Scholar

8. On food production, see San Jose Mercury Herald, Jan. 2, 1922, p. 9. In 1921, the annual orchard production of the county was over 300,000 tons; there were 175,000 tons of exports of fruits and vegetables; Sawyer, History of Santa Clara County, 139-140; on the formation of the cooperative, see Clyde Arbuckle, History of San Jose, 160. One of the leaders of the association was Superior Court Judge James R. Welch. Welch and the manager of the association, H. G. Coykendall, fought continuously over control of the association; see San Jose Mercury Herald, April 29, 1922, p. 9.

9. San Jose Federal Court Advisory Committee, 15. In 1920, there were close to 3,000 Japanese in the county, but only 840 Chinese. Gary Okihiro, Japanese Legacy (1985), 19. On Italian immigrants, see Payne, Santa Clara County, 98.

10. Cal. Const, of 1879, art. VI, sec. 8. The salary of the judges was fixed by statute at $5,000 per year; the county paid half, and the state paid the other half. 1915 Cal. Stat. 597.

11. Justices of the peace also heard minor civil cases. There were nine justices in the county in 1922. California Blue Book, Legislative Manual or State Roster, April, 1924, 194.

12. Judge Perley F. Gosbey, in Department 2, was in charge of probate matters. Civil cases were divided among the three departments.

13. The sheriff, by law, was to have ten deputies, one of whom had to be able to speak Italian. Cal. Pol. Code sec. 4235 (1915), as amended, 1921 Cal. Stat. 263-67.

14. California Blue Book, 194.

15. 1921 Cal. Stat. 354-55; California Commission on County Home Rule, 52.

16. On the probation committee: 1905 Cal. Stat. 781; 1913 Cal. Stat. 1290. On juvenile justice, 1903 Cal. Stat. 44; 1915 Cal. Stat. 1225. This law gave the juvenile court jurisdiction over all “destitute” people under twenty-one. Criminals under twenty-one were sent to state schools rather than to prison; if they were over sixteen, they were to be sent to the Preston School of Industry.

17. Sawyer, History of Santa Clara County, 262; San Jose Mercury Herald, Jan. 1, 1922, p. 13.

18. San Jose Mercury Herald, Jan. 29, 1922, p. 16.

19. In Hurtado v. California, 110 U.S. 506 (1884), the Supreme Court upheld the California system; the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment did not force states to use the indictment system. See Friedman and Percival, Roots of Justice, 167-68.

20. San Jose Mercury Herald, April 25, 1922, p. 9.

21. The police court had jurisdiction of petty larceny, breaches of the peace, all misdemeanors punishable by a fine not exceeding five hundred dollars and/or imprisonment not exceeding six months, and cases involving lewd or disorderly persons, or vagrants. Cal. Pol. Code, sec. 4426, enacted March 12, 1872.

22. See Friedman and Percival, Roots of Justice, 113-34, for a description of the work of the police courts in Alameda County, 1870-1910.

23. The vagrancy statute swept under its wing a wide variety of subjects: any person (except a “California Indian”) “without visible means of living,” who is physically able to work, but does not “seek” employment, or “labor when employment is offered him”; every beggar; every person “known to be a pickpocket, thief, burglar or confidence operator,” with no “visible or lawful means of support,” and “loitering around any steamboat landing, railroad depot, banking institution, broker's office, place of amusement, auction-room, store, shop, or crowded thoroughfare, car, or omnibus, or any public gathering or assembly” was a vagrant.

Similarly of “every idle, or lewd, or dissolute person or associate of known thieves;” and “every person who wanders about the streets at late or unusual hours of the night, without any visible or lawful business”; every person “who lodges in any barn, shed, shop, outhouse, vessel,” without the owner's permission; or who “lives in and about houses of ill-fame”; or who “acts as a runner or capper for attorneys in and about police courts or city prisons”; and, finally, every “common prostitute” or “common drunkard.” A vagrant could be fined up to five hundred dollars, or sent to county jail for a period up to six months, or both. Cal. Penal Code sec. 647. The original statute was passed in 1872, and had been most recently amended in 1911 Cal. Stat. 508.

24. San Jose Mercury Herald, Feb. 24, 1922, p. 7.Google Scholar

25. Ibid., May 4, 1922, p. 7.

26. Ibid., May 10, 1922, p. 7; ibid., May 12, 1922, p. 14; ibid., June 13, 1922, p. 7; ibid., June 21, 1922, p. 9.

27. Ibid., Feb. 7, 1922, p. 7.

28. Ibid., Jan. 11, 1922, p. 7.

29. 1915 Cal. Stat. 1225. The court, according to Sawyer, “hunts up cases of minors whose home life is not what it should be, or who have been regarded as bad boys or girls, made so by evil association and home surroundings,” and tries, “as far as possible,” to “give the subjects opportunity to lead moral lives.” Sawyer, History of Santa Clara County, 250.

30. San Jose Mercury Herald, July 7, 1922, p. 7.Google Scholar

31. See, in general, Sinclair, Andrew, Prohibition: The Era of Excess (1962)Google Scholar; Ostrander, Gilman M., The Prohibition Movement in California, 1848-1933 (1980)Google Scholar; Kyvig, David, ed., Law, Alcohol, and Order: Perspectives on National Prohibition (1985)Google Scholar. For some of the information in this section on prohibition in Santa Clara County, we are indebted to Alex Levinson, see note 45, below.

32. Local option: 1911 Cal. Stat. 599; election day, 1905 Cal. Stat. 645; state buildings, 1915 Cal. Stat. 1451.

33. Statement of Vote at General Election on Nov. 2, 1920 in the State of California, 35.

34. Ostrander, Prohibition Movement, 159.

35. Jacobson, Yvonne, Passing Farms, Enduring Values (1984), 123.Google Scholar

36. The ordinance was enacted by initiative vote in November, 1917. It provided that, after January 1, 1918, no person was to keep any “tippling house, dram shop, cellar, saloon, bar, bar room… or other place where… alcoholic liquors are sold” within the city limits of San Jose. The ordinance allowed liquor to be consumed in the home, to be dispensed “for medicinal purposes,” to be used “at sacramental services,” and, in a hotel or restaurant, to be served with meals under city permit, and under certain conditions. San Jose Mercury Herald, Feb. 25, 1922, p. 1.Google Scholar

37. Ibid., 1, 2.

38. Ibid., April 9, 1922, p. 13.

39. Ibid., April 22, 1922, p. 1

40. Ibid., April 23, 1922, p. 13; ibid., April 28, 1922, p. 9; ibid., April 30, 1922, p. 1. On the local level, the matters were not quite resolved. City Attorney Bowden, on May 2, refused to appear in Dougherty's court, as a protest against the judge's personal views of the matters. These differences were apparently ironed out later. Ibid., May 3, 1922, p. 13.

41. The margin in the County was 54 percent: 14,781 voted in favor, 11,767 against. Statement of Vote at General Election, November 7, 1922, in the State of California, 48. The November vote also added an amendment to the California Constitution, Proposition 2, which declared all acts in violation of the eighteenth amendment and the Volstead Act to be unlawful in the state, and vested local courts and officers with jurisdiction to enforce the laws.

42. See Burnham, John C., “New Perspective on the Prohibition ‘Experiment’ of the 1920's,” Journal of Social History 2 (Fall, 1968): 51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43. San Jose Mercury Herald, Jan. 1, 1923, p. 1Google Scholar. Federal prohibition agents had also taken property valued at $120,962; and assessed taxes or penalties for selling unstamped liquor to a total of $895,005.

44. Ibid., August 1, 1922, p. 9.

45. For example, in 1925: People v. Guy Falaschi, Santa Clara Superior Court Records, 1925, case no. 18617.5, April 6, 1925: violation of the Wright Act (possession of liquor).

In 1923, out of roughly one hundred criminal cases in Superior Court, seven involved the Wright Act; in 1926, there were eight out of 164; in 1929, fifteen out of 269. This information is from Alex Levinson, “State Enforcement of National Prohibition: A Case Study of Prohibition Enforcement in Santa Clara County,” unpublished paper, Stanford University Law School, June, 1987.

46. San Jose Mercury Herald, Jan. 3, 1923, p. 7Google Scholar. For some unexplained reason, the number of arrests was sharply up, as compared to the prior year: 4,260 compared to 2,550. Ibid., Jan. 1, 1922, p. 11.

47. Ibid., Jan. 1, 1923, p. 13. In one interesting case, an elderly man shot his son to death. The coroner's jury refused to find that a crime had been committed, even though father and son had quarreled beforehand. Ibid., Mar. 15, 1922, p. 7. The case did land in Superior Court, on March 23, but the files of the case do not record any decision. People v. Feltin, SC no. 17919.5, March 23, 1922.

48. San Jose Mercury Herald, Jan. 17, 1923, p. 14Google Scholar. Of the 1,248 cases, the majority were males (943); 305 were female. There were 33 adult probation cases.

49. Ibid., Jan. 3, 1923, p. 7.

50. The records in question are SC case numbers 17887.5 to 18091.5.

51. On plea bargaining in California, see Friedman and Percival, Roots of Justice, 174-81.

52. See Moley, Raymond, Our Criminal Courts (1930), 107Google Scholar; Friedman and Percival, Roots of Justice, 192-95.

53. See Friedman and Percival, Roots of Justice, 224-33.

54. Lawrence Narvaez, SC no. 17894.5, Feb. 14, 1922.

55. 1909 Cal. Stat. 365; Cal. Penal Code sec. 1192a; Friedman and Percival, Roots of Justice, 233-35.

56. SC no. 17893.5, Feb. 3, 1922.

57. SC no. 17835.5, Oct. 28, 1921.

58. On the indeterminate sentence, see Friedman, Lawrence M., A History of American Law, 2d ed. (1985), 597–98Google Scholar. California adopted its indeterminate sentencing law in 1917.

59. SC no. 17956.5, April 28, 1922.

60. Biennial Report, Att'y General of California, 1922-24 (1925), 84–85. People v. Hirano, SC no. 18089.5, Dec. 22, 1922; appellate decision, October 22, 1923. The defendant had been convicted of burglary in the first degree, and sentenced to serve seven and a half years at San Quentin; he also faced possible deportation. The second case was People v. Ton Jue, SC no. 18007.5, August 11, 1922. Defendant was convicted of selling poison, and sentenced to one year in the county jail. The case was affirmed on March 19, 1924, 43 Cal. App. 647 (1924).

61. Crimes against property, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and indeed earlier, dominated the ranks of felony crimes. In the Illinois Crime Survey in the late 1920s, 62 percent of the felonies in the sampled counties fell into three categories: burglary, larceny, and embezzlement and fraud. Illinois Crime Survey (1929), 59Google Scholar. In Alameda County, between 1880 and 1910, 61.8 percent of the felony cases were crimes against property. Friedman and Percival, Roots of Justice, 137.

62. SC no. 17977.5, June 9, 1922.

63. SC no. 17961.5, May 12, 1922.

64. SC no. 17891.5, Jan. 20, 1922.

65. San Jose Mercury Herald, Jan. 13, 1922, p. 1Google Scholar; ibid., Jan. 14, 1922, p. 3.

66. There were four cases of grand larceny: Two of the defendants were given probation; one juvenile was sentenced to Preston until age twenty-one; one defendant, Richard E. Bates, SC no. 17917.5, Mar. 23, 1922, who had a prior record, was sent to San Quentin for six years.

67. SC no. 18041.5, Sept. 29, 1922.

68. Anna Kelly (SC no. 17895.5, Feb. 3, 1922), accused of forgery, was one of only two women defendants. She had a long criminal record, and was sentenced to three years in San Quentin. She was quoted in the press as saying: “I did wrong and I'll take my punishment. I thought I was too shrewd for the police, but I find I was wrong and as a result I'll be simply 'No. so-and-so’ in the future.” San Jose Mercury Herald, Feb. 12, 1922, p. 9Google Scholar.

69. SC no. 18029.5, Sept. 22, 1922.

70. SC no. 18027.5, Sept. 22, 1922.

71. SC no. 17909.5, Mar. 10, 1922.

72. 1913 Cal. Stat. 212; Cal. Penal Code, sec. 261. On this topic, see Friedman and Percival, Roots of Justice, 139-40; see also Odem, Mary Ellen, Delinquent Daughters: The Sexual Regulation of Female Minors in the United States, 1880-1920 (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1989)Google Scholar.

73. In 1925, for example, there were even more examples in the files than in 1922: Merced Bustos, SC no. 18565.5, Feb. 3, 1925, a twenty-one-year-old Mexican laborer, pleaded guilty to sexual intercourse with a fifteen-year-old named Mary Tomey; Benedict Parodi, SC no 18649.5, May 6, 1925, was accused of having sex with a fourteen-year-old; he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two months in the Santa Clara county jail; the same victim was involved in Roy White's case, SC no. 18661.5, June 5, 1925.

William O'Neil, SC no. 18609.5, April 1, 1925, was accused of violating the Juvenile Court Law, by causing young Genevieve Cousins, age eighteen, to have sex with him and thus “encourage said Genevieve Cousins to lead and to be in danger of leading an idle, dissolute, lewd and immoral life.” The file does not show the outcome of this case.

74. SC no. 18071.5, Dec. 1, 1922; SC no. 18073.5, Dec. 1, 1922.

75. SC no. 18061.5, Sept. 4, 1922.

76. SC no. 17985.5, June 23, 1922; SC no. 18057.5, Nov. 3, 1922.

77. In 1925, Thomas Joseph Maloney, SC no. 18687.5, July 24, 1925, was accused of a “lewd and lascivious act… upon the body of John Lyon, a minor child,” eleven years old, by “placing his penis between the legs of the said minor child,” with the intent of “gratifying the lust and passions and sexual desires of said defendant.” Maloney was also charged with the related crime of sex with a child under twenty-one, SC no. 18725.5, Sept. 18, 1925, and on this charge he was sentenced to four months in County Jail.

78. In any event, such cases continued to be common in the Superior Court: in 1929, out of 269 total cases, there were 35 for failure to support. Levinson, “State Enforcement of National Prohibition,” Table 1.

79. SC no. 17893.5, Feb. 3, 1922. On this crime, see Friedman, Lawrence M., “Crimes of Mobility,” Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 637CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Bigamy cases were not common in the twentieth century; but in 1925, Perry L. Idleman, SC no. 18789.5, Dec. 11, 1925, was convicted of bigamy, and sentenced to four years at San Quentin, even though the district attorney had recommended a light sentence.

80. San Jose Mercury Herald, Jan. 1, 1922, p. 2.Google Scholar

81. In 1929, no less than 103 cases out of 269 were for driving under the influence of alcohol. Levinson, “State Enforcement of National Prohibition,” Table 1.

82. SC no. 16001.5, July 28, 1922.

83. Ms. Donald filed a civil suit, and a royal tangle ensued. Valentine brought a countersuit, for $ 150,000, claiming mental and physical injuries because of Ms. Donald's carelessness. Later, Valentine's wife brought suit against him—perhaps as a strategy to try to shelter some of Valentine's money from Ms. Donald. In the end, Valentine paid something over $50,000 to Ms. Donald—an enormous sum for the time. San Jose Mercury Herald, Sept. 23, 1922, p. 1Google Scholar; ibid., Sept. 30, 1922, p. 1; ibid., Sept. 31, 1922, p. 1.

84. Cal. Penal Code sec. 347a.

85. SC no. 18081.5, Dec. 22, 1922.

86. SC no. 17907.5, Mar. 3, 1922.

87. 1913 Cal. Stat. 722.

88. SC no. 17983.5, June 9, 1922.