Jack Johnson Will He Be Pardoned?

It was passed to prevent the trafficking of prostitutes (which was a genuine concern in that era). but in practice its wording was so open ended it could be (and was) badly misused and a lot of people fell foul of it. My point is Johnson wasn't uniquely targeted by the Mann Act, he wasn't the only one prosecuted, and it wasn't passed just to get back at him for beating up Jeffries. All Diggs and Caminetti did was take their consenting girlfriends to Reno, and they did jail time for it. What had they done to offend the government and white society?

 

If you don't think Johnson was targeted, you don't understand law, and enforcement agencies.

 

If you think Johnson was targeted, then do please explain how men like Diggs and Caminetti came to be prosecuted and jailed too.

 

Your logic assumes that because two white people were prosecuted, that Johnson couldn't have been targeted?

So because police officers kill white people, we can't assume that black people are bigger targets?

 

I think that you could make a pretty good case that Johnson was targeted.

The women involved were certainly subjected to duress.

 

Does anyone have the 1910 text of the relevant subsection(s) of the statute?

 

Your logic assumes that Johnson was only prosecuted because he was targeted. If two ordinary white guys were guilty of violating the Mann Act by taking their girlfriends away for a romantic weekend, then why wasn't Johnson guilty?

 

It is not unthinkable that those white guys might have made themselves inconvenient in some way.

 

There's no evidence of that though.

 

It is not exactly an unlikely scenario!

 

Well they didn't beat up Jim Jeffries, as far as I know!

 

Laws are inherently used to get rid of inconvenient people!

My farther worked for the Department of Environmental Health of the City Council, and if he came up against an inconvenient customer, he used to look through obscure laws to find something to prosecute them on.

One of his favourite tricks was “The Police Town Clauses Act” of 1847.

It includes things like “driving pigs madly”, but if somebody was repairing their car in the middle of the cull de sac and the neighbours were complaining, he could charge them with “repairing a carriage on the public highway”.

 

The way enforcement agencies like the FBI work, is they aggressively go after anyone they can. The FBI consists of real people with career ambition who seek opportunities to indict and convict people.

The fact that they used a law to arrest a couple people besides Johnson, in no way makes them innocent of targeting Johnson.

The scenario you mention is over simplified, and unrealistic.