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I wasn't using the definition of "felony" of that era, but of ours.
Crime was just very rare by our standards, and most of what there was
occurred in larger cities. In that era the large cities were New York,
Boston, and Philadelphia, each with populations of less than 20,000,
which are small towns by today's standards. It should also be noted that in that era a populous county was 3000 people, a number that would permit everyone to know everyone else personally. That number was served by one judge and one grand jury. Today we still often only have one grand jury for a county, but the county may have more than a million people, 6% of whom have some adverse encounters with the criminal justice system. As a result grand jurors may only have ten minutes to consider each case. That is not enough time to do their duty. We need to have a grand jury for every voting precinct of 3000 people, and make that a township with its own judge, constable, and other functions of local government. On 10/31/2009 11:06 AM, Henry E Schaffer wrote: We've also changed the definition of crime by, e.g., "creeping felonization." Many relatively minor crimes have been redefined as Class E felonies. There likely are other such types of inflation which then show up in the modern statistics. -- Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------- Constitution Society 2900 W Anderson Ln C-200-322, Austin, TX 78757 512/299-5001 www.constitution.org jon.rol...@constitution.org ------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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