Sleepy Lagoon Mystery

When seventeen boys are in jail for a murder that was never even established as a murder, and may possibly have been due to an automobile accident--when seventeen boys are tried in a court of justice by a judge notoriously prejudiced against anyone of Mexican descent--when officials of the county let it be known that they believe the whole Latin-American population of this hemisphere bears the lust for murder in its blood-stream, an inherited taint that can never be overcome--when during the trial one of the police investigators, who never denied that he brutally beat up certain of the boys, writes a lurid article for a pulp magazine describing the boys as vicious young terrorists guilty of murder, long before the jury has brought in a verdict--when the press drums up wild inventions about zoot-suit gangsters--Well, I ask you: is this American fair play? Is this our American system of considering people innocent until they are proved guilty? Beatings, forced confessions, news-paper terrorism, official racist policies openly enunciated: is this America? Is this California? I say the Sleepy Lagoon case is no sleeping matter.