The Death Penalty for Robbery and Grand Larceny?

Crime and violence was so prevalent in Gold Rush California that the new state went to extremes to try and combat the turmoil.  In the second session of the legislature, the senate and assembly, on 22 April 1851, amended "An Act Concerning Crimes and Punishments" for sections 59-61.

Here is the chapter and first two sections from the 1851 California statutes allowing for the death penalty in cases of robbery and grand larceny (involving more than $50 in property).

Section 59 specified that robbery, which had been subject to a punishment of from one to ten years in state prison was amnded so that "every person guilty of robbery shall be punished by imprisonment in the State prison for a term not less than one year nor more than ten years, or by death, in the discretion of the jury."

Section 60 dealt with grand larceny and the law had provided for a prison term from one to ten years in cases in which the amount of property stolen was more than fifty dollars.  The amendment, however, added the death penalty here, as well.

This is the third section of the amendment to the crimes and punishments act from April 1851 allowing up to 50 lashes "upon the bare back" for persons convicted of petty larceny (for property under $50 in value).

The final section, sixty-one, concerned petty larceny involving amounts under fifty dollars and the previous punishment  was up to six months in county jail and a fine of no more than $500.  The drastic change, though, provided that there could also be "any number of lashes not exceeding fifty upon the bare back, or by such fine or imprisonment and lashes, in the discretion of the jury."

While there were a very few instances of the application of the death penalty and of lashes in cases involving robbery, grand larceny and petty larceny, there were no examples of these occurring in Los Angeles County, even with its extraordinarily high rate of crime.

Given that the critical determination of employing these extreme measures was "in the discretion of the jury," it is evident the Los Angeles County juries were not willing to go to those lengths in rendering verdicts against those convicted of these crimes.

Remarkably, these legislative prescriptions were on the books for five years, but were finally repealed in April 1856.

Advice on Policing in Los Angeles from 1851

In late spring 1850, the Los Angeles region was ushered into a new age with the recasting of the town's governance and legal system.  The Mexican-era civil law system with an alcalde, ayuntamiento, and other officials were replaced with an American common-law structure with a mayor, common (city) council, city marshal, county sheriff, and a new grouping of courts and judges.

What was not incorporated initially was a formal police department, as the town's marshal and his deputies were charged with keeping the peace.  As the town grew during the intensity of the Gold Rush sweeping California, criminal activity and violence also skyrocketed.

Frustration with what seemed an unchecked tide of crime and violence, citizens clamored for a stronger organization and the common council responded by creating a police department, led by chief Alexander W. Hope.  The force proved to be short-lived, as economic reality dictated that it was simply too expensive with existing revenue to fund the department.

Tax rates were very low by modern standards, being fractions of one percent of every $100 in taxable property, so there wasn't much money available for much of any infrastructure.  For example, public schools weren't even in the picture yet, water delivery was limited to existing zanjas, or earthen ditches, and sewers were decades away.

Still, there was an initial effort to have a police department following trends developing in eastern American cities, which only recently had moved away from volunteer watch systems to paid police officers.

This letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Star, published in the 16 August 1851 issue, just a couple of months after the launch of the town's first newspaper, addressed some concerns, however, with the operations of the fledgling department.

Subscribing himself as "Order," the writer began by suggesting that officers "be required at all times when on duty, to be armed . . ."  By modern standards, this seems baffling to have to recommend police officers carry weapons, but it appears that in 1851 Los Angeles, some peace officers, were, in fact, unarmed.

Continuing, "Order" stated that officers should also "be instructed carefully as to what rights they have in case of resistance" and that it was necessary "to have clear and positive orders as to the disposal they can make of a prisoner when arrested."

He noted that, the previous evening, a man was arrested "under aggravating circumstances" and then released to go home without a weapon.  Yet, just twenty minutes later, the same individual was found "'spreading himself'" with a revolver "to the terror of one of the prettiest and otherwise quietest balls I have ever seen in the town."  It took some effort, evidently, to wrest the weapon away from the subject, to the extent, "Order" claimed, that "a fatal result came very near being necessary . . . for want of firmness at the outset."

The conclusion was that "This 'six-shooter" business must be kept in check," particularly at social events like the ball at which the incident took place.

Incidentally, references to "six-shooters" in the letter are interesting because the Colt revolver had been introduced to the market in 1849. This was just in time for the uproar of the Gold Rush, in which hordes of young single men, free of the restraining influences of home and family (if they had these), fueled by alcohol, and armed with the latest in weaponry technology, found themselves in a place with almost no workable government, law enforcement system or judicial system.  Moreover, Gold Rush California was filled with people from many ethnic groups, including Chinese, Mexicans, Americans, Europeans and more.  Even in the best of circumstances, this assemblage could hardly be expected to get along well and California was certainly not in the best of circumstances.

Los Angeles may not have been in the hotbed of activity in the gold fields, but it did have an important role as a waystation to and from the mines and points south and east.  Its population was in flux and its saloons, gambling houses, brothels and other "places of entertainment" were breeding grounds for much of the crime and violence that gave the "City of Angels" its devlish reputation.

"Order" was likely representing the view of many others in the community that improvements to law enforcement, along with the courts, was an imperative in the town and county.  Yet, for years afterward, rampant criminal activity and ineffective policing and court operations plagued the town.

Future posts will highlight this struggle to come to terms with these issues, so check back soon!

Joaquin Murrieta and the Los Angeles Rangers

On this day in 1853, the Los Angeles Star newspaper had two articles of interest regarding crime and justice in early LA.

The first was about the recent formation of a citizen militia organized to defend the town and county against what was perceived as rampant, unmitigated, unchecked criminal activity.

The Rangers were formed at a time when, throughout the United States, citizen militias were very popular.  The captain was A.W. Hope, who was the first designated police chief, when a small force was created in 1851, during another time of grave concern about crime.  The treasurer and clerk was David W. Alexander, later a two-time sheriff (1856, 1876-77) of the county.

Part of a 6 August 1853 article in the Los Angeles Star newspaper discussing the recent formation of the citizen militia called the Los Angeles Rangers.

Members included Horace Bell, whose 1881 memoir Reminiscences of a Ranger was noted in the last post; William Little, a member of the posse led by Sheriff James Barton which was mowed down by Latino bandits in present-day Orange County in January 1857; William C. Getman, who was a city marshal and briefly sheriff before he was killed in the line of duty just a year after Barton; C.E. [listed as E.C.] Hale, who replaced Alexander as sheriff in 1856; Eli Smith, a future deputy sheriff; Octavius Morgan, who was publisher of the short-lived, but colorful (and vigilante supporting) newspaper, the Southern Californian; Thomas Rand, whose brother William was a founder of the Star and of the famed Rand McNally firm; and W.T.B. Sanford, whose brother-in-law Phineas Banning became one of the region's most prominent citizens and a vigilante.

There were quite a few citizen militias in Los Angeles through the 1870s, but the Rangers appeared to have been the most active by far, at least for a stretch there in the middle Fifties.  Bell's colorful and exaggerated book burnished and expanded the group's image significantly, but it is also fair to suggest that its presence was helful in trying to put a crimp on crime.  More on the Rangers in future posts.

Meantime, the other article of interest was one that reported on the supposed capture and extralegal execution of the famed and semi-legendary bandido Joaquin Murrieta.  The San Francisco Alta California, the week prior on 30 July, published a report stating Joaquin and six of his bandits were confronted by a militia called the California Rangers, led by Captain Harry Love, who was, however, absent when Joaquin was captured and killed.  The report continued that Love had returned with prisoners "and the head of Joaquin preserved in spirits."

Here's more on the membership and leaders of the Rangers, as well as an article about the purported capture of the semi-mythical bandido Joaquin Murrieta from the same issue of the Star.

According to some sources, it is unclear if there was one Murrieta or several. There have also been claims that Murrieta wasn't caught and that someone else was taken and killed instead.  Histories purporting to tell the story of the notorious bandit have been published, but have to be taken as largely imaginary, given that contemporary sources are sketchy and spotty at best.

Murrieta' s legend was enlarged significantly when it was reported that his picked head, said to have been long displayed in San Francisco, was reported destroyed in the great earthquake and fire of April 1906.

As for the Los Angeles area, it was said that Murrieta frequently appeared in town and, in one particular case, involving the murder of San Gabriel saloon keeper and Indian fighter Joshua Bean, he may have had a direct role.  More, too, on that in a subsequent post.

A Murder a Day?: Homicide in 1850s Los Angeles

Los Angeles, the City of Angels, had a nationwide reputation as a den of deviltry.  During the 1850s and, especially, the heyday of the Gold Rush in the first years of that decade, the levels of violence found in the town and country was nothing less than shocking.

Naturally, homicide is the type of crime that gets the greatest amount of attention.  When it comes to trying to get a handle of how much homicide there was during the tumultuous Fifties, however, there is a wide range of information out there.

For example, Horace Bell, a longtime resident who arrived in the town in late 1852, wrote in his entertaining but exaggerated memoir, Reminiscences of a Ranger, published in 1881, that "the year '53 showed an average mortaility from fights and assassinations of over one per day in Los Angeles."  He went on to claim that "police statistics" showed more murders in California than in the rest of the United States and more in Los Angeles than throughout the state.

This excerpt from the 1927 edition of Horace Bell's Reminiscences of a Ranger states that there was more than a murder a day in Los Angeles in 1853.

The polar opposite of Bell in temperament and style was merchant Harris Newmark, a migrant of 1853 to Los Angeles who wrote his Sixty Years in Southern California in, of course, 1913.  Newmark observed that "human life at this period was about the cheapest thing in Los Angeles" and identified Calle de los Negros, or "Nigger Alley" as Newmark expresed it, a short, narrow lane off the southeast corner of the Plaza as where "a large proportion of the twenty or thirty murders a month" took place.

William Lewis Manly, a survivor of the ill-fated Death Valley '49ers emigrant party, wrote in his book, Death Valley in '49, that "the country was overstocked with desperate and lawless renegades in Los Angeles, and from one to four dead men was about the number picked up in the streets each morning."

There were, however, more muted reports.  Rev. James Woods organized a Presbyterian church at Los Angeles in 1854-55 and, in his Recollections of Pioneer Work in California, observed "I do not think it would be much exaggeration to say that, during that year, there was an average of one person killed each week."  Bear in mind that Woods admitted this could be a slight distortion of the truth.

William Brewer who wrote of his experiences as a surveyor through California, stated in his memoir that "fifty to sixty murders per year" was common in Los Angeles in the years prior to his first visits around 1860.

Merchant Harris Newmark in his memoir, Sixty Years in Southern California, claimed that there were some 240 to 360 murders a year in Los Angeles when he arrived in town in 1853.

Then, there is the 11 October 1851 edition of the fledgling newspaper, the Los Angeles Star, which cited a list provided by the deputy sheriff showing that, over the preceding fifteen months, there had been 44 homicides in Los Angeles County.  Twenty of these were in the city and outlying township of Los Angeles.  Notably, seventeen were in the San Bernardino area, which had only recently been established as a Mormon outpost.  Of these, however, eleven were members of the Irving bandit gang killed in a clash with Cahuilla Indians near present-day Redlands.

This latter brings up an important point:  if these bandits were outsiders from northern California who happened to be in the region for a short period of time and then were killed in a pitched battle, how do we define "homicide" or "murder"?  How many more of the reported "homicides" were matters of self-defense, suicide, or other types of death that are distinct from murder?

Finally, there is the ambitious effort mounted by the sociologist Eric Monkonnen and students to tally all homicides in Los Angeles from 1827 to 2002.  Conducted for the Criminal Justice Research Center at Ohio State University, the database could not be further refined when Monkonnen suddenly died in 2005.

What the table of homicides show is a range of between eight and twenty-eight incidences during the 1850s, with the peak occurring in 1854 and twenty-five more homicides taking place the following year.  These totals were nearly twice as much as the third highest total, fifteen in 1853.  Subsequent years showed a noted decline, to three each in 1862 and 1863, and then, as Los Angeles experienced its first significant growth in the late 1860s and early 1870s, a rise to as high as seventeen homicides in 1870 and eleven the next year.

There is a problem, however, with this data.  On 24 October 1871, a nightmare of staggering proportions was experienced when a multiethnic mob of Europeans, Americans, Mexicans and Spanish-speaking Californios shot, stabbed and hung nineteen Chinese males (including a 15-year old) in a mass lynching.  These victims inexplicably are missing from the table Monkonnen and his associates compiled.

The Rev. James Woods, a Presbyterian minister in Los Angeles in 1854-55, stated, with not "much exaggeration" that about 50 persons were killed in the town that year in this statement from his Recollections of Pioneer Work in California.

In any case, the significant variations in statistics are notable.  Perhaps the best the can be said is that the extremes of a "murder a day" found in Bell, Newmark and Manly are almost certainly gross exaggerations.  At the same time, the Monkonnen research is probably undercounted.  Maybe Woods, Brewer and the Star were closer to the mark.

Even so, assuming that 30-60 homicides (murders or otherwise) took place in a given year during the 1850s, this is a stunning rate for a town that could not have been much larger than, say, five thousand persons or so.

An important tangent:  the 1850 federal census, conducted in early 1851, tallied 1,610 persons in Los Angeles and 3,530 in the county.  However, a state census taken just over a year later in 1852 came up with a total figure of just under 8,000 persons in the county.  The difference appears to have mainly been in the head count of native Indians.  The federal census only enumerated a couple hundred odd native people, while the state census came up with nearly 4,000!  In 1860, by contrast, the native total was just a little over 2,000 and the city was listed as having over 4,400 residents with the county topping 11,000.

Returning to proportions: even a "modest" total of 30 or 40 homicides in a year for the county is something in the range of 1 in 200 to 1 in 250 or so, if we accept a general figure of 8,000 county residents.  Given that Los Angeles County had a reported 551 homicides among a population of around 10 million or 1 for every 18,000 or so people, it is easy to see how staggering the homicide rate was in the 1850s.  The "murder a day" totals would suggest somewhere around 4.5% of the population of the county was killed in a given year.

Sure, it could be argued that there was much more transiency in Gold Rush-era Los Angeles, so that many of those killed in the town and county were passers-by rather than settled residents.  There is no question, though, that the homicide rate, by any standard, was simply astronomical.

Why is almost certainly impossible to pinpoint with accuracy, just like finding reliable statistics on homicide and other crimes, but this blog will devote significant attention to the environment in mid 19th-century Los Angeles and look to provide some context for these mind-blowing numbers!

Before his death, Eric Monkonnen completed an article on his research for the Journal of Interdisciplinary History and which was published in Autumn 2005.  This statement might be as apt as one can find for the tentative nature of the homicide question and for most of the history of that era of Los Angeles as a whole:

On this basis of this patchwork history, we can begin to understand how a beautiful and prosperous region can become tainted with vicious, lethal crime.  Beginning is the best we can do at this point because social scientists, historians and other scientists cannot yet fully explain the causes of homicide, nor what works in its suppression.  The facts are elusive, the theories and hypotheses unconnected and speculative, and the data difficult to compile . . . as an overview, it raises as many questions as it answers.

This blog and the book of the same name, now being written, basically hold to this view.  We cannot know with certainty how crime and justice interrelate because the evidence is elusive, the interpretations are often speculative, and the data is hard to compile.  More questions are raised than answers.

But, we have to begin somewhere on the path to this fascinating patchwork history of crime and justice in Los Angeles between 1850 and 1875.  Welcome and join me as we tentatively navigate this remarkable journey!