The Mooney-Billings Report; Suppressed By the Wickersham Commission

New York: Gotham House, 1932. First Edition . Hardcover. Very Good. iv, 243, [1] pp. Draft of Mooney-Billings Report submitted to the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement by it's Section of Lawless Enforcement of Law, June, 1931. This section was dropped from the 1932 Kenyon Report of the Commission findings. The suppressed report reviewed the 1916 convictions of labor activists Tom Mooney to death and Warren K. Billings to life in prison for a bombing in San Francisco. The case contained abuses so blatant, they were compared the Dreyfus case. Allegations of police and prosecutorial misconduct were so well documented that in1918, after intervention by President Wilson, Mooney's death sentence was commuted to life. A Time magazine story of 1/18/1932, quoted William D. Mitchell, Pres. Hoover's Attorney General about... a report made by a subcommittee of the Wickersham Commission on the Mooney-Billings case....Its conclusions: 1) "There was never any scientific attempt made either by the police or prosecution to discover the perpetrators of the crime"; 2) "there were flagrant violations of the statutory law of California by both police and prosecution"; 3) "witnesses were coached ... to a degree that approached subornation of perjury." In 1938, after they had served 22 years, California's new governor, Culbert Olson, ordered that Mooney and Billings be released. It all makes very lively reading, [and nice to know we once had an Attorney General who put justice first.]