By Gregory Clark, September 22, 1928.
“This court,” states Magistrate Robert J. Browne, “stands adjourned for one hour for lunch. It will continue if necessary until midnight.
“We will have no quick-lunch justice here!”
Quick-lunch justice!
Everything about the old Toronto police court calls for quick-lunch justice. Justice slid along the greasy counter. Justice slapped down on the plate. The dingy old court room shouts for it. The dark and dismal corridor outside the door where distressed mankind waits for all the world like a Hogarth1 drawing of the Old Bailey – all shout for quick-lunch justice. For mercy’s sake, make it speedy.
Here is a court room that was built in 1899. In 1899, a buggy was the fastest thing on Toronto’s streets. In 1899 there were less than 200,000 people in Toronto. Booze provided only one or two problems – drunks, desertions. Now booze has become a complex thing, bootleggers, motorists, dives. In 1899 it was an honor and privilege to appear before Colonel Denison2 in the beautiful spacious new court room..
But age withers.
The windows of the police court to-day have shrunk to slits that let in a gray light. The curtains are drab and faded. The woodwork seems stained by countless sinful vapors.
The roar of a great city forbids that windows be opened. The tumult of the gears which turn the wheels of justice in this old room make it sometimes impossible for the court to proceed. On one day recently, Magistrate Browne sat from ten o’clock in the morning until four-fifteen in the afternoon before the “morning” court was ended.
Five different police courts exist in Toronto, and except for a small committee-room next door to the main court room, the old police court has somehow to accommodate them all. The “drunk” court, now shrunken to a little formality of twenty minutes. Then the main criminal police court, which in the heyday of Colonel Denison, used to run from ten to twelve o’clock and which now runs on and on, sometimes into the late afternoon; the women’s court in the little crowded committee-room, the traffic court in the afternoon wherever it can be accommodated, and on certain days, the health court, which sandwiches itself wherever it can find a high desk and a fragment of silence.
In this one year, there will be one hundred and twenty-five thousand cases pass through these courts!
The Police Court Midway
What is guarding Toronto, then, from quick-lunch justice? From slap-stick justice?
The corridor is like a midway. Toughs and gentle women witnesses; babies in arms, thundering policemen, sick people, broken-hearted people, grim accusers, sly, shifty ones – the human midway, the corridor of the Toronto police court.
Toronto’s court has no witness rooms, no counsel’s rooms, no privacy whatsoever. The law of the land is that the court room shall be public. Whoever gets there first gets a seat in the court room, and the rest are herded into the corridor, to listen and strain amidst the shadowy din to their names called. Lawyers must consult their clients in this public highway. Witnesses, tragic or cold, gentle or rough, must all sit together and take away a nightmare with them when they go.
Common human sympathy urges everybody to hurry, to get the thing over and done with.
But Toronto’s five magistrates live in fear. They live in fear of being influenced by physical conditions around them. They do not know from one hour to the next which court room they will be in. Nothing is ordered or orderly. They live in a kind of pandemonium, but they will not err in the direction of speed.
“There will be no quick-lunch justice here,” says Magistrate Browne.
“Lewis Harris,” cries the clerk of the court.
“Lewis Harris,” echoes the constable of the dock.
At the back, the public is wedged in tight in the benches. In all the standing room, constables and detectives, witnesses and officials are packed in. The dock is filled with a row of midway spectacles, who look like the men who sing, in a Balieff ballet3, the “Song of the Volga Boatmen.”4 One of them, Lewis Harris, rises and stands forth.
Between him and Magistrate Browne on his high bench, are the lawyers, privileged characters, who rise and sit, bend and scuffle, talk and wave documents, come and go. Over all this scene there quivers a tumult of sound and movement.
But away up against the high panelled wall, alone and aloof, in black coat and wing collar, sits the young magistrate. He is handsome in the Greek way. His eyes are intense blue and very wide and quiet. He has a broad, strong mouth, which turns down in a faint sardonic smile when the rumpus of his court reaches one of the panics of physical congestion.
He is at rest. None of the excitement seems to reach him. His head is framed against the high panels, and you think the gray hair on his temples is blonde hair, so peaceful is his face.
“Lewis Harris!” cries the clerk of the court. In triumph, as if proud to produce anybody at all amidst all this whirligig.
No Off-Hand Judgment
Harris is an old man, bowed, white-haired, with spectacles down on his nose like a collector of coins.
We are all sympathy at once for Lewis Harris. What crime can be juggled up against so quaint and helpless an old man as this?
Maybe, we thought, he has no home and has come to the end of the long, long tether.
“Pickpocket,” says a voice, amidst the countless whispering, murmuring voices.
It seems that at the Exhibition, two visitors caught Lewis Harris with his hand entering one of their pockets. They held him and a detective arrived.
What an absurdity! Pickpockets are young and nimble and foreign. This man is old and gentle and far from nimble.
A lawyer is standing up, leaning forward and stretching up his arms in gesticulation to Magistrate Browne.
“Sixty-eight years old,” exclaims the lawyer. “It is admitted he tried to pick the pocket. But he is so old, your worship. Deport him. Send him back to the States where he came from. Fell for a momentary temptation.”
But another lawyer is on his feet, a rugby player of a lawyer. He is the crown prosecutor and he holds in his hand a very large sheet of foolscap.
“A record, your worship.” he says in a man’s voice that cuts through the fog, “dating back to 1894. Philadelphia, 1894; Boston, 1896; Chicago, 1899; San Francisco, 1904; Portland, Oregon, 1906; San Antonio, Texas, 1907; Detroit, 1913: Toledo, 1916; Omaha, 1918; Atlanta, Georgia, 1922…”
Why Lewis Harris is no poor old man! He is an adventurer, a world traveller! A man who has seen the world.
“All,” says the prosecutor with the man’s voice, “for picking pockets.”
“Sixty-eight years old!” pleads the lawyer. “He is not long for this world. Deport him, your worship. Send him back to where he belongs.”
The magistrate’s wide blue eyes are staring at the old bent figure below him.
No quick-lunch justice here.
“We can only feel sympathy,” says the magistrate, “for this old man at the end of his life. But the interests of the community must be served. We cannot deport him. That would only create the impression amongst American crooks that they can come up here with impunity, take their chance, and if caught, all their punishment would amount to would be to be sent back home at no expense to themselves. Nine months in the reformatory, and to be deported at the conclusion of his term.”
Thinking Down His Sympathy
The next case is a boy.
He is young and clean and slim. There is a delicate look about him. If we felt sympathy for a sinful old man, we feel even more sympathy for this straight youth of nineteen. He has the face of a poet, and this is no company for poets.
A poor woman hobbles in and sits beside the lawyers at the witness bench.
The boy, it seems, is charged with criminal negligence. He drove a truck and struck down this woman. All the evidence comes out, a doctor concluding with detailed technical description of the injuries. The woman with three little children got off a street car under the Queen St. subway and along out of the gloom came this truck and hurled her to the ground.
The boy walks nervously to the witness box and stands up close to Magistrate Browne. They talk face to face.
“Have you a driver’s license?” asks the magistrate.
“No, sir. I am studying music….”
“He won,” says the boy’s lawyer, “the governor-general’s prize for violin two years ago.”
“I am on my holidays,” continues the boy. “And I was helping my brother. I thought I would help him, so I drove this truck from the repair shop to our home.”
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen. I got along all right, but coming through the Queen St. subway, it was dim, and I was following the street car. I did not know street cars stopped in the subway. Suddenly. I found myself rushing beside the street car. It was all a whirl. I had struck the woman before I knew anything. It was all over…”
What kind of justice will we get here?
Surely a young man with only a little gray at his temples will feel a great sympathy for this boy and his violin, who suddenly in the dimness found himself rushing past the street car and all his life tumbling about his head.
Do students of the violin go to jail?
“There is nothing in your favor,” says the magistrate, slowly. Let the court beg for hurry. Let anxious fists hammer at the gates. “Nothing in your favor. You are young. You have no license to drive. You are not accustomed to driving. Yet you take a death-dealing machine through the streets of this city. And only the mercy of God prevented you from, killing a woman and two of her three children. This is a dangerous age.”
An almost silence has come on the court and the lawyer stands with jaw fallen. The magistrate is staring with calm eyes at the boy, thinking down his sympathy, thinking it down.
“You will go to the reformatory for one year.”
The student of the violin does not seem to understand. He has not been used to paying. Others pay. He plays.
Will he take his violin to the prison, I wonder?
World is More Complex
Thieves, embezzlers. forgers, thugs, sneaks, they get their time and their share.
Five different men charged with reckless driving, or being drunk in charge of cars, go down to jail.
All one man did was crash into the rear of a truck. He went to jail for ten days. He had had “half a glass of beer” earlier in the day.
“I wish,” says Magistrate Browne, “the press would give greater prominence to the sentences imposed on reckless and negligent drivers. There is no mercy here for men who drive motors negligently and recklessly or when under the influence of liquor in the slightest degree.”
The hours drag on.
Already the traffic court cases for the afternoon are gathering out in the corridor and the confusion and rumpus seems to be on the increase.
Order! Order! Order! The magistrate demands it, sardonically. He has an inspector in the court room whose sole duty is to preserve order and decorum in the court. There are ten or a dozen constables and officials to back him up.
And because the magistrate was once a soldier he gets order, even out of what is clearly inevitable.
But what can you expect of an old and sin-blown court room that dates back to 99. when the fastest thing in Toronto’s streets was a buggy and the only problem booze gave us was drunkenness, to be dealt with in the quick-lunch way, with humorous jests from the bench and comic items in the daily press?
We’ve come a long way. The world is stranger, more complex than in 99.
“Yet,” says Magistrate Browne, “we’ll have no quick-lunch justice here!”
Editor’s Notes: (There was a section of this story that I deleted as it was racist to immigrants).
- William Hogarth was an 18th century English artist. ↩︎
- George Taylor Denison was a Canadian lawyer, military officer and writer. ↩︎
- Nikita F. Balieff was a Russian Armenian born vaudevillian, stage performer, and director. He is best known as the creator and master of ceremonies of La Chauve-Souris theater group. ↩︎
- The “Song of the Volga Boatmen” is a well-known traditional Russian song. ↩︎
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