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Source: 1965 Toronto International Convention – 1965 Toronto Int, AA and the Courts Toronto Canada Part 2 of 2.mp3 File: 1965-toronto-international-convention-1965-toronto-int-aa-and-the-courts-toronto-canada-part-2-of-2.mp3 Duration: 00:39:02
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The contents of Box F3 will continue on this tape. All right. Our third and last speaker is another distinguished member of the judiciary. Judge Daly is judge of the Municipal Court in the City and County of San Francisco, where he was appointed to the bench in April of 1962. He was assistant district attorney and did a particularly good research job, which culminated in the establishment of a pilot clinic for the treatment of alcoholics in San Francisco.
The Department of Alcoholic Rehabilitation now operates eight or nine similar clinics throughout the state of California. Judge Daly has been a most enthusiastic, loyal, and helpful friend to alcoholics in general and in particular to AA. I give you Judge Daly. I beg your pardon, Your Honor. I stand before you this morning, symbolic of millions of others who have found themselves in court, charged with doing something that we just don't quite understand.
Please, sir, I'm not complaining about the officer who arrested me, but it did come as a shock to learn that I was charged, booked, and put in jail for something that I don't know, and something that is called a crime. I'm not a criminal, Your Honor. It has always been my good fortune throughout my life to entertain a great respect and admiration for the court. This is my first appearance in a court of law, either criminal or otherwise.
Last evening, as I lay in my cell and thought of my appearance before you this morning, I prepared a short statement which I'd like to read. Do you mind, sir? Thank you very much. Thank you very much. You see, I and countless other defendants who are charged with being drunk or drunk driving or disturbing the peace or disorderly conduct might wonder to ourselves, who is this person sitting on the bench?
The person who will pass judgment on the stream of offenders who parade before him and who will be required to correct, if possible, those offenders and who may be called on later to sentence those who plead or are found guilty. At home, I suppose the judge is very much like other people. He plays with his children, worries about his mounting bills and taxes, reads his daily newspaper, and discusses the weather with his neighbors.
But each morning, when the judge goes to work, he puts on a plain black robe and somehow becomes something bigger than himself. There's a touch of ceremony as he walks into the courtroom. Please rise, says the bailiff in a formal kind of voice. Dishonor the judge. Now the difficult work for the judge begins. People talk, arguers all, attackers and defenders, each believing that he or she alone is right.
I wasn't drunk. The other guy caused the accident. What? I just had a couple of beers. I'm as sober as a judge. Voices may be raised, tempers are lost, manners too often forgotten, but never by the judge. He must be a soother of tempers, a referee among antagonists,
[00:05:01]
a cool guardian of the rules of the road and his court. What does the judge think about each morning, sitting high, lonely on his bench? Is it only the law, or is there something else? Maybe he remembers with some deeper part of his mind and training that all the laws written into the big book and all the multiple sections of the penal code are but different ways of saying one simple thing. We the people want and expect fair play for every man.
Maybe that concept is what keeps the judge strong, clear and calm while the angry arguments swirl around him, including the defendant who only had two beers. Your honor, your honor we call him, but we really mean our own honor. The public's honor, because we the public have woven into the plain black robe of the judge the ideals that make up the honor of an American, our devotion to what is right and what is wrong, and good, with our determination to protect those who need our understanding and who need our help.
Wear these robes and these ideals every day, we tell the judge. And incidentally, never let us, the people, forget that. The bailiff faces the question. Faces the question. Your honor the judge, he says. We the people, and particularly each defendant in the courtroom, rise with a touch of ceremony as our ideals as Americans walk slowly, oh so slowly, toward that tall oak bench. Mary, Tom, Judge Murtaugh, Word to God, and everyone's self toward the court, as just stated by our friend over there a moment ago, unfortunately we must face the fact that the following represents a little more realistically what Judge Murtaugh and I and thousands of other judges throughout the country hear sometime under their voices.
We're apt to hear, to hell with the judge. To hell with the cops. And believe it or not, once in a while you'll hear somebody say, to hell with AA. Yes, my friends, that's the cry that has gone up from the throats and lips of hundreds of thousands of unfortunate, befuddled men and women who appear before our judges day after day in the courtrooms of our land. Individuals charged with any number of crimes, crimes that are identified in one way or another with the defendant's inability to drink alcoholic beverages without getting in trouble with the law.
This sordid, pitiful procession of drunks throughout our courtrooms presents one of the most difficult problems that any judge has to contend with. In my conversations with hundreds of judges in California and throughout the United States relative to their attitude toward alcoholics anonymous in the courts, I find a wide diversity of opinions. Some judges have a real understanding and appreciation of alcoholics anonymous and its meaning.
Others know very little, if anything, about it.
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Oh, it's so easy, as Judge Murtaugh can tell you, for any judge to become cynical toward the daily routine of hearing hundreds of drunk cases. Each morning as I leave my chambers to enter the courtroom, I say to myself, look out, Judge Daly, don't carry any cynicism or prejudices with you into that courtroom. Remember that out there in that room, there are hundreds of people who are in court for the first time.
They may be from age 17 to 70, and remember that many of them may not fully realize that they have committed a criminal or serious offense. And when he or she appears before you, it may be a most difficult moment for them. Well, if it's a difficult moment for the defendant, whether he be an alcoholic or a non-alcoholic, it may also be a soul-searching moment for any conscientious judge. There's a moment when justice to the defendant and to the community must be done.
How can a judge ensure that this critical moment may become meaningful to the particular defendant before him, to his family, to the press, and to the community? Surely there is need for more than a cold, routine sentence of so many dollars, so many days, or so many months in jail. Without an interpretation to the defendant, any sentence given by the judge may not produce the result intended by the court.
The public may conclude that justice was betrayed. The prosecution, as represented by the district attorney's office or the police department, may rightfully conclude that their efforts in arresting the violator and bringing him into court went for naught. On the other hand, on the other hand, the defendant may receive his sentence, no matter how small, and still feel embittered by the thought that the judge pulled the sentence out of thin air.
Each judge has his own method or philosophy, which he applies in sentencing the drinking driver, or particularly the drinking offender. In my experience, I have found the following to be very helpful. When sitting on the traffic moving violation for some seven months in San Francisco, where I heard hundreds of cases a day, it became obvious that most violators could be classified under three main categories.
We call them the can'ts, the don'ts, and the won'ts. You know the can'ts, they're the ones that shouldn't drive a car because of some physical difficulty. The don'ts are the ones that don't know and don't understand the rules of the road. The won'ts are the ones that know the rules very well, but simply won't live up to them. Now, later in my experience in the so-called junk court in San Francisco, I find that I could apply this same yardstick in trying to determine what kind of sentence or supportive help I could give to the drinking offenders.
First, the can'ts. These are the ones who, as I stated, suffer from some severe mental or physical handicap. They're persons who shouldn't be classified as alcoholics merely because they were picked up by the police in what appeared to be an alcoholic state. Second, the don'ts. They're the persons who simply do not know or understand that they have an alcoholic problem. He may be 17 or 70. It makes no difference.
Here, the judge can make use of whatever facilities are available in his community. The dependent may be sent to the city hospital for diagnosis and some form of treatment, or to a correctional institution where it is hoped that the alcoholic may find some understanding of his problem, provided that there is a desire on the part of the correctional staff to help him even though they're treating him.
Staff to Help Him Even Though Their Treatment Program May Be Limited. He May Be Sent to a First Step House or to a Clinic for Alcoholics, Provided That Your Local Community Has One.
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The main objective that the Court should have in mind with the don't drinker is to assist him in doing something about his drinking problem before it is too late. It is in this group that I find that Alcoholics Anonymous can be and are most effective. Further reference will be made to this later in my remarks pertaining to the San Francisco program. Now having touched briefly on the Court and their attitude toward the drunk or problem drinkers, it has been suggested to me that I might tell you something of what we are trying to do with the problem in far-off California.
Especially since in my beloved and adopted city of San Francisco, the press and others have referred to it often as the drunkenest city in the United States. Personally, I refuse to agree with that dubious honor. But there are days, believe me, when I sit in the drunk court and see the seemingly endless line of drunks pass before me each morning, I'd be hard put to refute the claim. In telling the California story, it will be necessary for me to use the pronoun I quite often, and I ask your indulgence and understanding. I'm not suffering from I either.
My first real interest in the alcoholic problem began in 1948 when I was the Deputy District Attorney in San Francisco under Edmund G. Papp Brown, who is now the Governor of the State of California. One day Mr. Brown came into my office and showed me the arrest figures for drunkenness in San Francisco. Just plain drunk, nothing else, 46,417 persons. Of these total arrests, about 97% of them were released overnight after being in the lockup for a dry-out period.
Mr. Brown asked me to undertake a study of the problem and try to come up with something constructive, suggesting on how we could do something about this very difficult situation. In my efforts to get the facts, I personally interviewed 153 persons who had been sentenced to our county jail in San Francisco for being just drunk. The records showed that they had been arrested 7,569 times, or an average of a little better than 49 arrests per person.
Out of a total of 2,138 automobile accidents involving drivers, 1,172 were under the influence of alcohol and an additional 866 had been drinking. In my search to find out why this drinking problem existed and what might be done about it, interviews were had by me with law enforcement officials who entertained the idea at that time, and many still do, that the drunk is incapable of doing anything else.
They used to tell me, once a drunk always a drunk. The alcoholic was generally described to me as a weak-willed, irresponsible person who drank because he liked to drink and had no desire to better his circumstance in any way. The doctors that I interviewed at that time were, believe me, not overly sympathetic toward the drunk. They would tell me that it's not very pleasant to be awake until 3 or 4 in the morning to go to attend someone who is suffering the consequences of his indulgence in alcoholic beverages during the night or days before.
My investigation showed that about 50% of all the drunks arrested in San Francisco came from what we call our Skid Row area.
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The other half were spread throughout the various police precincts of the city. I interviewed one man who had been arrested for being drunk 2,000 times. He is the man who did 12-step work on me without my knowing. I figured that if one man went to jail 2,000 times for being drunk, certainly jail wasn't the answer. It was shown that the total cost of police arrests, jail costs, and related expenditures came to $1,700,000 annually. Think of it, in one city.
In those days it was difficult to get any definitive answers. But with 50% of the arrests coming from the Skid Row area, and I couldn't get the answers that I wanted, I decided to go and take a look-see for myself. So I actually went down and lived for two weeks in Skid Row. I'm probably the only judge in the United States that came from Skid Row. I did this in an effort to get first-hand knowledge of the problem.
And I can assure you, I got first-hand knowledge. I can still smell it after all these years. There I saw men and women who were homeless because they were alcoholics. And I saw alcoholics who were homeless because they simply didn't know what to do with their property. A homeless man, drifting and ruthless, has very little motivation for abstaining. In his culture, heavy drinking is regarded as normal, and the abstainer is viewed with some suspicion.
In a Skid Row flophouse, if an alcoholic must take or make a choice between a flophouse or a bottle, he'll take the bottle. Because to him, the lodging is a luxury, whereas the bottle is a necessity. The more I learned, the more I was convinced that San Francisco was spending needlessly millions of dollars in processing these people as criminals, instead of looking upon them as persons suffering from an illness or a disease.
The simple statistical analysis of the system in vogue then seemed to give eloquent evidence of its failure. So to make a long and a somewhat fascinating three-month study short, may I state that I did make a report. The report created widespread interest and enthusiasm in San Francisco. The papers became interested, and it was decided to establish a treatment facility for the alcoholic for the first time in California on the taxpayer level.
The Board of Supervisors authorized the establishment of an inpatient pilot plan clinic, and agreed to allocate $50,000 to carry out the program of screening, diagnosing, and treating the person charged with drunkenness. That clinic opened, it's strange to say, in the month of July, just 16 years ago, with 20 beds, and they were kept constantly full. And I was happy to report 18 months later, on February 1, 1952, the status of the patients who had been treated during that period of time.
29% of them had left the city, 22% had reported that they had gone back and resumed their drinking, but 49% were sober. A large number of that 49% joined Alcoholics Anonymous at that time. And one of the proudest things that I have ever done in my life is to open a letter, even today, from members who went in that clinic 16 years ago.
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And they report to me from all over the United States. They judge I'm still on the program. With this surprising success with our pilot inpatient clinic, I again appeared before the Board of Supervisors and pleaded for an outpatient clinic. Fortunately, the city fathers went along with me, and in the spring of 1951, we opened our outpatient clinic with a budget from the city and county of $75,000. And that, my dear friends, could never have been done without the aid and assistance of dedicated members of Alcoholics Anonymous who worked with me.
In the first three years of the operation, the clinic had over 4,000 new cases. The success of that clinic brought in interest from all over the state of California, and as a result, we were able then to walk in or move into the state arena. That's a long story, but we finally got a bill passed through the state legislature which put an additional 10% tax on the liquor license fees, which brings in or has brought in a minimum of $800,000 a year.
One of the main objectives of the bill was to foster education in California on the total drinking problem and to establish clinics throughout the state which were to be modeled, more or less, on the San Francisco experiment. So today we have eight alcoholic clinics in California. They're under the administration of the State Department of Public Health. My latest figures are that there are 1,341 alcoholics in treatment in this program.
And incidentally, the state of California, on the state level, has spent over $7 million in the last seven years on this program. Notwithstanding, and I'm sorry to say, notwithstanding the relative success which we have had in the treatment of alcoholics, yet reasonably reliable statistics reflect that today one half of the jail cells in our state are still filled with persons charged with being drunk, and 50% of our automobile fatalities in the metropolitan areas of California still involve persons who have been drinking.
In 1963, we had 54,000 arrests for drunk driving in California. A study conducted jointly by the Division of Alcoholic Rehabilitation and the Department of Public Health reflects that all persons committed to the California State Correctional Facility, that out of that number, 50% had been drinking before the commission of their felonious crimes, 23% claimed to have been intoxicated at the time of the commission of the crime.
Before going on the bench three and a half years ago, I spent three and a half years as a member of the board of the California Youth Authority. I was a sort of a traveling juvenile court judge. I found that about 80% of the more than 5,000 juveniles who came before me, 80%, under the California Youth Authority, were involved in some way with alcohol. Broken homes by alcoholics, homes in which drinking to excess had been a social grace, have contributed to the delinquency of these minors.
As a result, crimes of assault, car theft, burglary, robbery, and so on, which followed, have been traced to youth drinking problems and parties. I would like to say a few words now concerning the San Francisco Council on Alcoholism, which is a non-governmental agency, health agency, concerned with the illness called alcoholism. Originally, this council was established by one of your very, very dear friends.
I believe he is in this audience, and I would like to pay tribute to him, because he was the genius, the man who was behind getting this council started. I refer to Professor Austin McCormick. Austin, will you rise? Whatever Austin touches, he leaves the mark of a great man behind. We love you out there, Austin, and miss you.
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The council now operates out of the Presbyterian Hospital Medical Center in San Francisco. As one part of the service, a staff representative of the council attends all sessions of our drunk court as a friend of the court. Incidentally, I was at the session just last Wednesday night of this week. We had 80 persons in attendance. This person is available to confer with the judge on the disposition of individual cases and to work with liaison officers by the police department assigned to the court.
A school has been established for the prevention of progressive alcoholism for those individuals who may be in their early stages of the illness. Our court thereby provides a site in the community whereby persons with an alcoholic problem may be detected and offered constructive aid. We have four class sessions. In these sessions, we will emphasize a physician's viewpoint of alcoholism, showing that it is an illness. The second speaker will be an alcoholic's anonymous member, who will tell about their program. The third are recovered alcoholics, how he dealt with his own particular problem, and fourth, the community resources for help.
On the program's inception in July of 1964, just a year ago, the first month, we had 905 individuals who were assigned to that school. Currently, no warrants are issued for violation of probation by failure to attend the school. Violation of probation becomes a factor only if the person concerned is rearrested and appears before the court. The person may then be sentenced or occasionally be given another assignment to the school.
And so now, my friends, I would like to dedicate these few concluding remarks to one of the finest gentlemen it has ever been my personal privilege to know. I refer to Mr. Jack Irving, former secretary of the San Francisco Inter-County Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous in San Francisco. Through the years, whenever I had a real tough case before me and didn't know what to do with it, I'd get in touch with Jack. He was never too busy, never too tired to come to my assistance.
A few short weeks ago, I encountered such a person. He was very intelligent, but he was a difficult, stubborn, problem drinker, and I thought maybe if Jack could talk to him, he might become interested in at least going to Alcoholics Anonymous. Jack took over and did his usual masterful job in explaining to this difficult individual the basic philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous. He explained that its members recognized that they were powerless to overcome their dependence on alcohol, and they acknowledged a power greater than themselves.
When Jack mentioned a power greater than themselves, at that moment I noticed a smirk come over the face of this troubled person. And as Jack kept referring to a power greater than ourselves, this disbeliever finally couldn't stand it any longer, and he shouted, I knew you'd get around to God and that religious stuff eventually. Well, let me tell you something, brother. I don't want and I don't need your AA.
And let me tell you something else. I don't believe in God. I'm an atheist. I'm a master of my own faith. And may I tell you something else? I'm going to join the Communist Party and become one of their members. They've got the right ideas, great brilliant scientific intellectual minds. None of this God stuff.
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They're going to put a man on the moon and conquer and rule the universe. And I'll tell you something else, brother. When they get a man on the moon, I'm certain there won't be any members of Alcoholics Anonymous up there. Well, having learned to fear and love God at my mother's knees some sixty years ago, I could not stand to listen to the atheistic, blasphemous talk of my friends. So I left. But Jack Irving never lost his composure or patience, and he was still listening and talking quietly to our disbelievers as I departed.
Undoubtedly, there are no members of Alcoholics Anonymous on the moon, but I do believe with certainty that at least one more member of AA has gone to a far better reward. Jack Irving died just two days after the above-related conversation. Yes, my atheistic friend may be right with his materialistic philosophy, but you wonderful people who are members of Alcoholics Anonymous, you know too much about matter to ever be material.
You and I know too much about the stars to ever think that we will be just stardust. Yes, our Cold War atheistic brothers may boast of their scientific galaxy of tongues and style worlds. They may boast of their bulk and their size. Yes, and of their speed. But remember, my friends, we too have our boast. Christ walked our earth. Yes, Christ walked our earth. I pray that I may never forget that for as long as I live.
I love you all. Thank you. Would you all wait just a moment please? First I would like to ask those of you who wish to join us in saying the Lord's Prayer. What do you want? Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation, for thine is the curse from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen. Thank you all.