A Significant Decision

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Dec 24, 1908

A Significant Decision

A RECENT decision by Judge Robert F. Raymond, of the Massachusetts bench, is of more than local interest in its bearing upon the question of the responsibility of labor organizations for encouraging acts of violence. In the case of a man on trial, who was suspected of having blown up material provided for the construction of a railroad bridge, because the bridge company employed non-union help, the judge excluded all evidence tending to show that the accused, as a member of a labor union, might be actuated in the commission of the crime by his antagonism toward non-union principles. In rendering his decision the judge said:—

The policy of the commonwealth of Massachusetts and the declarations of the courts of Massachusetts, up to this day, have always been in favor of labor organizations; and these declarations have been put on the ground that a labor organization is not only legal, but that the objects of labor organizations are commendable. They go beyond merely saying that labor organizations are legal, and may be upheld by the courts. They declare that the object of labor organizations is a commendable object. They put them on precisely the same footing with reference to their objects as a Masonic or an Odd Fellows' order, or, for that matter, as a church; and the necessary inference follows from that that a membership in a labor union can not be used to infer that because of such membership a man intended to commit a crime. The law, so far as there is any law on the matter, presumes the contrary. It presumes that labor organizations will restrain their members from crime as well as they will endeavor to secure beneficent objects.

In view of the well-established fact that in connection with almost every large strike, the members of labor unions have organized themselves for acts of violence, including murderous assaults upon non-union men and the destruction of property, there does not seem to be proper justification for the assumption that “labor organizations will restrain their members from crime.” To class labor unions with churches in the influence which they exert to prevent crime, is a new revelation of the curious conclusions at which the legal mind sometimes arrives. If this decision is followed by other courts, it will make it all the more difficult to convict members of labor unions charged with violence.