| OCR Text |
Show The Mercenary Daily Press. THE daily press of Salt Lake, in its treatment of local news, particularly particu-larly criminal news and anything reflecting upon the character of a person, per-son, makes no distinction between public pub-lic opinion and public curiosity. In its desire -to satisfy the last it utterly ignores the first. No remonstrance from the religious element of our people, peo-ple, no persuasion from men and women wo-men occupying the clean side of social life, inhibits the local press from opening open-ing the floodgates of scandal and immorality im-morality and publishing the details of crime in all its offensiveness, even obscenity. ob-scenity. Resentment, so far from teaching the daily press a lesson or leading to any modification of the sensational, sen-sational, only makes the reporter more wicked. The editorial Pecksniff attempts at-tempts to condone for all this by preaching a lesson on morality! Our thoughts were brought back to a most horrible crime by an incident in the district court the other day. There is much or little in the inci dent, according as the law may be construed regarding dismissal of persons per-sons charged with capital offenses. We believe the court was engaged in setting set-ting a time for trial of a number of civil and criminal cases, and while so employed, the prosecuting attorney, Mr. Eichnor, made a motion postponing postpon-ing the trial of the boy Felt, charged with murdering a man who, it is alleged, al-leged, urged him to commit the homicide. homi-cide. The motion was granted and a future day set for the hearing. . At the time, Mr. Eichnor stated that the prosecution, was reluctant to bring the boy to trial, for two reasons. The first was the tender age of the criminal crim-inal and the provocation inciting the deed upon a person who was better out of the world than in it. The other and far better reason was fear that the testimony brought out, necessarily of the most debasing kind, would be published in the papers and help corrupt cor-rupt the mind and morals of the youth of the community. A prosecuting attorney at-torney never offered a better suggestion sugges-tion in support of good morals in any court of the land. For doing so, Mr. Eichnor deserves the praise of every Christian, of every clean man and woman wo-man in Salt Lake City. Apprehensive that Mr. Eichnor may carry his point and the. public be denied de-nied the pleasure of gloating over the deed committed by this boy when presented pre-sented in all its nasty details, one of the afternoon papers (the Telegram) proceeds to teach the prosecuting attorney at-torney a lesson in criminal procedure, and it does it by asking him several questions, like this: Will District Attorney Eichnor kindly inform an ignorant public just where in the English common law, or in the corpus juris chilis, or any state criminal crim-inal code, or in any established body of precedents, or in any federal decision, the principle is laid down that one may lawfully kill, except in defense of one's own life or that of another, or to save from great bodily harm? Of course these questions apply to any capital offense as well as to the case of the Felt boy, but the motive of bringing them out at this time is plainly plain-ly apparent. It is done to obstruct the contemplated dismissal of the boy, at least before he has had trial and all the filthy testimony is brought out in the hearing. If not done for such reason, and for the mercenary sake of selling papers containing the reports of the trial, what other object is behind such questions? We are not in position to suggest any answer to these questions in behalf of Mr. Eichnor. We leave that task to himself. He is a lawyer, and his record of convictions in the criminal court demonstrates that he is a good one. Whether it be good practice or bad practice we are 'not prepared to say, yet we recall a number of cases in our courts which were dismissed for reasons less meritorious through the act of dismissal than the one presented present-ed by the boy. Felt. For the sake of the morals of the community, we hope the same course may be taken with the Felt case. Either that or have the trial conducted secretly, with the reporters no nearer to it than the outside of the court-house door. |
