Retainer of Prison-Dodging Captains of Industry - Measures Not Allowed
to Reach Senate or Assembly, but Killed in Committees - Grove L.
Johnson's Keen Opposition.



The graft prosecution at San Francisco not only brought the fact
squarely before the public that large corporations sometimes catch the
easiest way to achieve their purposes by bribing public officials, but
that it is a deal easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle
than a millionaire offender through the legal cobwebs of technicality to
a cell at San Quentin or Folsom[72].

That the technical defense in criminal cases was subject to grave abuses
had been generally recognized. But it took the graft cases at San
Francisco to fairly rub this unpleasant fact into the law-abiding
element. Because for the first time in the practice of criminal law in
California, unlimited wealth was available to employ the best legal
talent to defend men under indictment.

The defending lawyers took advantage of every technicality. They
emphasized the most trivial of them. Gradually it began to dawn upon The
People that here were legal refuges, based upon the most absurd of
technicalities, the sweeping away of which would in no way injure the
substantial rights of a person charged with crime, refuges which were
available to the rich man but denied to the poor or moderately
well-to-do.

To be sure, any person accused could make his technical defense if he
had the means to employ the necessary counsel. But in face of the