Show Garcia Met With Crime At Prejudice At Court This is the fourth of background and Sketching the The author is ol Jesse Story ol the for Carol com- mi t By ETHEL C. HAMS As Jesse his difficulties drew with Through the years there no doubt many records kept on bul could have all no one person the facts of his childhood Even if his mother were Still living she would not know this His sister knows only a few Jesse's own recollections are vague and THE NEXT decisive in Jesse's life were those leading to his incarceration at the Utah State We think of this as an institution for Utah law sets no minimum age for imprisonment teenagers are commonly granted for the purpose of Why was Jesse sent His crime no doubt of there was no question of the seriousness of his no question that- institutional restraint was He had been variously diagnosed by but with at that he was and emotionally less mature than a H E COULD have been sent to a federal institution in Colorado where he would have received psychiatric Under a trade an inmate from the Colorado institution not in need of psychiatric care could have been traded for an inmate of the Utah State Industrial School in making the special care cost-free to Utah except for Jesse was sent to On August an inmate was found brutally murdered in a prison It was a shocking the murder itself became insignificant in the scandals bared by the For the second time in a few years the state prison was shown to be a haven for crime and these were the most sordid of The citizens of Utah were soon in a frenzy of indignation but they were never sure where they should place the THE HORRORS of life in the prison were spread over every Convicts apparently had access to a hallucination-invoking drug carrying of weapons was some inmates were treated as chattels by there was no segregation of inmates according to of The unsophisticated population of Utah was shocked by revelations of homosexual activities in the by the prison political coercion which controlled Point-of-the Mountain was a microcosm of Big Crime organization on the It was hardly more sordid but it was And this could not be escaped this way of life was barred In the middle of the indignation and civic shame which Jesse Garcia was after the trial of Mack Merrill and Leonard Warner What of the legal asS Few persons L any idea what evidence against any of the The press i the shocking prison there was little coverage of motivation and motivation to the as professed h admits attar denies inflicting fatal would have severely offended prevailing standards of to Bowne and declared and declare their innocence of the and lack of knowledge that any crimp was In the were tried in the public not for the murder of the convict to popular the victim was NOT a but for all the corruption at the They were not as its victims but as its was sentenced to Bowne to life at his later trial to On what basis were the sentences There was but highly questionable that tied Garcia more closely to the crime than Those who are sophisticated in the ways of law enforcement are not always fully impressed by such THE is first to find the then having decided he is to look specifically for the evidence that will convict a local law enforcement officer stated at the Institute of and Law Enforcement at the University in 1961 not referring to crime in this already knew in my own mind that he was I still had to get the There is abundant documentation available demonstrating this Any type of prejudice is as effective at this level as at higher levels of law It would be an error to assume quickly that because the Anglo was given only life that Jesse's death sentence was due to prejudice against IT WOULD BE even more erroneous to believe that there was no ethnic prejudice One could not say except for Jesse's life would have been but only the most naive could believe it possible to in this a jury not of peers free ol such Statistical evidence demonstrates that ethnic minorities are singled from among thousands convicted of capital crimes every year in the United to supreme weight of prejudice was in ine courtroom and may have tipped the Human fallibility and |