The Third Degree: The Triple Murder That Shook Washington and Changed American Criminal Justice
224
The Third Degree: The Triple Murder That Shook Washington and Changed American Criminal Justice
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Overview
2019 Independent Publisher Book Award Winner (Gold) in U.S. History If you’ve ever seen an episode of Law and Order, you can probably recite your Miranda rights by heart. But you likely don’t know that these rights had their roots in the case of a young Chinese man accused of murdering three diplomats in Washington DC in 1919. A frantic search for clues and dogged interrogations by gumshoes erupted in sensational news and editorial coverage and intensified international pressure on the police to crack the case. Part murder mystery, part courtroom drama, and part landmark legal case, The Third Degree is the true story of a young man’s abuse by the Washington police and an arduous, seven-year journey through the legal system that drew in Warren G. Harding, William Howard Taft, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John W. Davis, and J. Edgar Hoover. The ordeal culminated in a sweeping Supreme Court ruling penned by Justice Louis Brandeis that set the stage for the Miranda warning many years later. Scott D. Seligman argues that the importance of the case hinges not on the defendant’s guilt or innocence but on the imperative that a system that presumes one is innocent until proven guilty provides protections against coerced confessions. Today, when the treatment of suspects between arrest and trial remains controversial, when bias against immigrants and minorities in law enforcement continues to deny them their rights, and when protecting individuals from compulsory self-incrimination is still an uphill battle, this century-old legal spellbinder is a cautionary tale that reminds us how we got where we are today and makes us wonder how far we have yet to go.
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781612349947 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Potomac Books |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2018 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Scott D. Seligman is a writer and historian. He is the author of several books, including Tong Wars: The Untold Story of Vice, Money, and Murder in New York’s Chinatown and The First Chinese American: The Remarkable Life of Wong Chin Foo. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the Seattle Times, and the China Business Review, among other publications. He has worked as a legislative assistant to a member of the U.S. Congress, lobbied the Chinese government on behalf of American business, and managed a multinational public relations agency in China.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Three Men in a Tub
The ss Empress of Russia had established herself as the Queen of the Pacific on her maiden voyage from Yokohama to Vancouver in 1913. Despite dense fog, blustery winds, and choppy seas, the nearly 600-foot British-built steamer made the journey in just nine days and five hours, shaving a full day off the previous record.
The "largest, fastest and most elegantly furnished" passenger steamship sailing the Pacific in its day, the liner had been fitted out to accommodate nearly three hundred passengers in first class, a hundred in second, and another eight hundred in steerage. It required a crew of 475 to operate. The first-class staterooms, arrayed around a grand staircase, featured sleeping berths fitted with brass bedsteads and private hot- and cold-water baths. Élite passengers paid as much as $225 — more than $5,000 in today's currency and three times the cost of a steerage ticket — for passage from China to North America in comfort. For that fare they enjoyed the use of a 430-foot promenade, luxurious lounges, an opulent café, a writing room, a card room, a library, a gymnasium, and even a fully equipped dark room. And in quiet alcoves in the period-style dining hall, they supped on roast sirloin of beef, baked York ham, clear turtle soup, and herring roe on toast.
If you had the money, this was surely the way to cross the ocean.
On April 8, 1916, the Empress discharged 356 passengers at Vancouver. About half were Chinese who had boarded in Hong Kong and Shanghai; these accounted for the lion's share of the steerage passengers. Few Chinese could afford to travel any other way. The vast majority were young Cantonese men, unskilled laborers bound ostensibly for Canada. If the opportunity presented itself, however, many no doubt hoped eventually to sneak across the border into the United States, where they might find work in the laundries and restaurants of San Francisco, New York, and other cities.
Subterfuge was necessary because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which for more than three decades had forbidden the entry of Chinese workers into the United States. That 1882 Act of the U.S. Congress had slowed the number of legal Chinese immigrants to a trickle. It did not, however, apply to merchants, teachers, students, or diplomats, who were still permitted to enter freely. America wanted no more of China's laborers, but it was perfectly happy to accept her intelligentsia and her gentry.
Only seven Chinese were among the more than two hundred souls traveling in first class; these included two Washington DC–bound diplomats and a privately funded student heading for Ohio. The three knew one another; they were all Shanghainese and presented themselves together for examination by U.S. immigration officials conveniently stationed in Vancouver. These inspectors could bounce undesirables back to the Orient before they ever reached America. But the three Chinese men had little cause for worry. They were anything but migrant workers and they had no doubt they would be welcome.
The eldest of the trio was Dr. Theodore Ting Wong, quiet, balding, and bespectacled. He was on his third trip to the United States and was traveling at government expense. The scion of an unusual family with strong ties to America, Dr. Wong was heading back to resume his work at the Chinese Educational Mission after a year-long furlough. His associate, Chang Hsi Hsie, had been manning the organization in his absence.
Accompanying him on the Empress was Ben Sen Wu, who was coming for the first time. Like Wong, Wu came from privilege: his brother, chief of the treasury division of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was a government official. Not yet eighteen, Wu did not know much English, but as one of the mission's scholarship students, he planned to improve his language skills and moonlight as a student at George Washington University.
The third man, who shared a stateroom with Wu, was traveling under somewhat different auspices. His name was Ziang Sung Wan and he was just shy of his twenty-first birthday. At nearly five foot ten he was relatively tall for a Chinese, but slender in build. Raised and educated in Shanghai, Wan also came from a well-to-do family with connections to the United States. His father had been one of the first 120 Chinese students ever to study abroad; the elder Wan had been sent to New England in the 1870s at age ten as part of a government-sponsored program — ironically also known as the Chinese Educational Mission. But after his return to China he had died at the age of thirty-five, leaving a widow with a sizeable estate and three boys and a girl to raise alone.
Like the Wongs, the Wan family was Episcopalian; through the congregation in Shanghai, Dr. Wong had known Ziang Sung Wan since his childhood. Young Wan had attended Chant's Academy and St. John's College, both church-organized schools, so he spoke excellent English. Raised without a father, however, he was spoiled and undisciplined and had grown into something of a ne'er-do-well.
Wan's mother was worried about this son. She had begged Dr. Wong to take him to the United States to study in order to straighten him out, and to look out for him while he was there. She had paid for the young man's passage and given him funds to enroll in school once he arrived in America, since he was not a government scholarship recipient. Unlike that of his two shipmates, Wan's initial destination was not Washington but rather the Midwest, where his younger brother had preceded him.
No one — least of all any of the three — could have predicted that, before four years had elapsed, two of them would be murdered in cold blood and the third would be accused of the crimes. Or that his arrest and trial would enthrall the capital city and capture national attention for several years. Nor could anyone possibly have foreseen that his case would ultimately reach the highest court in the land and establish an important legal principle.
It would take America a giant step forward toward guaranteeing the rights of criminal suspects and protecting them from abusive interrogation at the hands of police across the nation.
CHAPTER 2
An Unwelcome Guest
Approximately 350 government-funded Chinese students were studying in the United States when Dr. Wong and Ben Sen Wu arrived in Washington in 1916. They were attending some of America's best schools, including Cornell, MIT, Columbia, the University of Michigan, Harvard, George Washington, and the University of Pennsylvania. Their expenses were paid from a scholarship fund created from money the Chinese government had been forced to pay to the U.S. government following the Boxer Rebellion of 1899–1901.
A violent, xenophobic uprising in which many foreign missionaries, merchants, and diplomats lost life and property, that rebellion had enjoyed tacit government support; when it was finally suppressed by an international military force, the Qing regime — China's Manchu government — was compelled to pay reparations to the governments of eight foreign countries. These took the form of a $333 million indemnity, payable in installments. America's share was just over seven percent: about $24 million, or more than $500 million in today's dollars.
It soon became clear, however, that America's losses amounted to only about half of that sum, so discussions began about returning the surplus to China. President Theodore Roosevelt was willing to do this, but he was persuaded to set terms for how the money was to be spent. These conditions were benevolent: they called for establishing schools in China and for sending Chinese students abroad. Once the enabling legislation passed Congress in 1908, the first remittance was made. And when the Qing dynasty fell in 1912, its successor government — the Republic of China — assumed its obligations and continued the program.
Boxer indemnity funds underwrote the 1911 establishment in Beijing of Tsinghua Imperial College — later Tsinghua University — whose early mission was to prepare Chinese students for study in America. Young Chinese men — and, beginning in 1916, women as well — were sent to the United States at the rate of about fifty a year; over the life of the program, more than 1,200 students were supported.
Theodore Wong had been an excellent choice to manage this program, not only because he was well regarded as a scholar — he had authored a compendium of the Chinese dynasties and edited a Chinese-English dictionary — but also because he was outgoing and genial and possessed a near-native command of English. Perhaps most importantly, he was well connected in China and wise in the ways of America. His father, the Reverend Kong Chai Wong, had been the first convert of the American Episcopal Church in Shanghai as well its first Chinese deacon and its first Chinese priest. He had also been one of the first recorded Chinese visitors to the southern United States when he traveled there with an American missionary in 1843. His wife, Theodore's mother, had been the first Chinese girl in Shanghai to receive baptism.
Theodore — the ninth of ten children, only six of whom survived to adulthood, and the only son — had thus been raised Christian, which was rare in late nineteenth-century China. He had grown up around foreigners. He had also prepared at St. John's College — later St. John's University — and had first sailed for the United States in 1892 to continue his studies, initially at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, and later at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. There he read Greek, Latin, history, English, natural philosophy, and political economy. He finished his studies in 1896.
By 1898 he had returned to China, where he married Julia Sih (Xue Pa), one of the first students at the McTyeire School, a girls' academy established in Shanghai by Methodist missionaries in 1892. He was twenty-two — it was time to begin a family. Beginning in 1899, Julia bore five daughters, followed by two sons. It was a happy household, their daughter Ethel recalled, "always full of laughter." Wong was light on his feet and there were frequent dancing parties and social gatherings. The children enjoyed a life of leisurely vacations, imported foodstuffs, and European- and American-made toys.
A modest man, Wong first became a teacher. He was also active in the Chinese Red Cross and served as the first president of the Shanghai YMCA. In 1909, he had been named chief secretary of the new Shanghai-Nanking (Nanjing) Railroad and, at the end of 1911, leaving his family behind, he had been sent to Washington to supervise the overseas students supported by the Chinese Educational Mission. He was in America when the boy emperor Pu Yi abdicated the throne and the Republic of China was established; he remained in the United States until 1915, when he took home leave in China for a reunion with his family.
In Washington, Wong had initially rented an apartment on Columbia Road in the northwest quadrant of the city, living and working there with Chang Hsi Hsie, the organization's treasurer. Hsie, also a St. John's graduate, was a steady hand who watched the money and kept the organization on track. He had served the foreign ministry in its Yokohama consulate before becoming registrar at Tsinghua and had arrived in the United States two years earlier.
It was a good time to be away from China. The new democracy had gotten off to a decidedly shaky start. Yuan Shih Kai (Yuan Shikai), who had assumed the presidency, soon waged war with his political adversaries, dissolved the national assembly, and actually briefly proclaimed himself emperor. There was a revolt against him in the south. Warlords in several provinces maintained local militias and governed with little regard for the central authorities. Japan, already occupying part of Manchuria and the former German colony at Qingdao and hungry for more territory, had just presented China with a secret set of twenty-one demands that would essentially turn the country into a vassal state.
War was also very much on people's minds in Washington. Woodrow Wilson, who had won the presidency three years earlier, was running for re-election on the slogan "He kept us out of war," but America would not be able to stay out much longer. Domestically, Wilson pushed a progressive agenda and appointed officials to match. Among them was John W. Davis, known popularly as "the lawyer's lawyer," who was named solicitor general in 1913. Although he was a political conservative who opposed women's suffrage, he supported progressive initiatives aimed at limiting the power of big business. As a congressman from West Virginia, he had been one of the authors of the Clayton Antitrust Act, which aimed to curb anticompetitive practices in the corporate world. During the first five years of the Wilson administration, Davis gained valuable experience as the government's chief litigator, arguing constitutional cases before the Supreme Court.
Another Wilson appointee was attorney Louis D. Brandeis, known, by contrast, as "the people's lawyer," for the time and energy he devoted to public causes and his commitment to social justice. Wilson's choice of Brandeis for a seat on the Supreme Court in 1916 was so controversial that he became the first candidate in the history of the court whose nomination was subjected to confirmation hearings in the Senate — a blistering, four-month process that had more to do with his Judaism than it did his judicial philosophy.
The capital city was undergoing a massive makeover, inspired by the City Beautiful movement, which sought to spruce up urban America and promote civic virtue and social order in the process. Victoriana was out; the campaign emphasized classical architecture and open spaces. The McMillan Plan, formulated by a senate commission at the beginning of the century, had dictated the destruction of vast tracts of slums, the reclamation of land for waterfront parks, and the creation of grand vistas. Union Station, the gleaming white neoclassical rail terminal designed by architect Daniel Burnham, had risen in 1908 and anticipated the construction of similar edifices. And Congress would soon appropriate funds for renovation of the Old City Hall, which had, since the Civil War, housed the District of Columbia courts. The Judiciary Square structure was to be stripped to its brick framing and its exterior stucco replaced with neoclassical white limestone.
Washington was growing rapidly. Between 1910 and 1920, its population increased by a third to more than 430,000. But only the affluent could afford to live in Kalorama, a tony northwest neighborhood just north of the original city limits in which Wong rented a townhouse in 1916 for Hsie, Wu, and himself to live and work. Located at 2023 Kalorama Road, just half a block from Connecticut Avenue, the ten-room, brick-and-stone row house, which he leased for $60 a month, was a short walk from the Chinese Legation on 19th Street.
President Warren G. Harding, then a U.S. senator from Ohio, would buy a house in that neighborhood the following year and remain in it until his inauguration in 1921. That same year, Herbert Hoover would move to the neighborhood and stay until he, too, packed up for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Former president William Howard Taft would purchase a home there as he assumed the position of chief justice of the United States. John Edgar Hoover, a Justice Department attorney who would soon become head of the Bureau of Investigation's new General Intelligence Division, lived a few doors from the mission. All these men would play important roles in the drama that would follow from events that occurred at the new mission offices on a winter's night in 1919.
The District of Columbia also had a tiny but well-established Chinatown. Like most of the Chinese quarters in the cities of the East and Midwest, it had gotten its start in the 1870s, when Chinese from the West began migrating eastward in growing numbers to search for work and to flee bigotry and violence against them that had burgeoned after the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. Washington was home to approximately 400 Chinese — mostly laundrymen, cigar-makers, restaurateurs, and grocers — and the bulk lived on, or adjacent to, a short, run-down stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue near the Capitol between 3rd and 7th Streets NW. Like the Chinese population elsewhere in America, Washington's Chinatown was predominantly Cantonese and overwhelmingly male.
Wong and his associates probably bought provisions from these Chinese and certainly ate at their restaurants, but they lived three miles away and surely considered themselves a breed apart. They were highly educated and fluent English speakers, whereas most local Chinese were neither. They were Shanghainese, speaking a dialect unintelligible to the Cantonese. They were government officials from a cosmopolitan city who came from privilege, not former peasants and shopkeepers from rural villages in a far corner of the empire. They hobnobbed with upper-class Americans, while those in Chinatown washed their shirts. Wong and Wu had traveled to America in a first-class cabin; few residents of Chinatown could make a similar claim.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Third Degree"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Scott D. Seligman.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Preface Dramatis Personae Prologue: “The Best of Spirits Prevailed” 1. Three Men in a Tub 2. An Unwelcome Guest 3. Murder at the Mission 4. Incommunicado 5. Interrogation 6. Confession 7. Indictment and Trial 8. Appeal 9. The Third Degree 10. The Supreme Court 11. Retrial 12. Freedom 13. The Wickersham Report 14. The Road to Miranda Epilogue Chronology Acknowledgments Notes Selected Bibliography Index