"Pitiful"

"What transpired at the hearing?"

"There was no hearing, may it please the Court."

"Do I understand you properly? There was no hearing? . . . Have you the original minutes in the case?"

"There were none."

"None whatever?"

"That is the usual procedure, your Honor."

"Was there ever any charge that this girl was a prostitute?"

"No."

"Are there many such cases?"

"There are about 400, your Honor."

"Pitiful, pitiful," groaned his Honor, Justice Norman S. Dike of the New York Supreme Court. Peering over his glasses he surveyed Lena Burlatt, a girl of 17 who had just come out of New York's repository for wayward females, Bedford Reformatory. He learned that Lena's mother had taken her to court one day 18 months ago, on her 16th birthday. Lena's mother had told the judge that Lena "stayed out late." The judge, Magistrate Leo Healy, had forthwith sentenced Lena to one year in Bedford Reformatory. She had been kept there six months overtime and might have been there still but for the discoveries about other Bedford commitments--"frame-ups" by venal members of the police vice squad--which have lately added fresh disgrace to New York City's corruption-riddled judiciary (TIME, Dec. 29 et seq.)

Justice Dike told Lena Burlatt that in Bedford Reformatory, well-run though it is, "there are some vicious women, some frightfully vicious women." He advised her to forget anything she had learned there. . . . Then he sent her home with the mother who had committed her at 16 for "staying out late."

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