Latest Important Cases* Advertising Nuisance. Advertisements At tached to Vehicles—Restrictive Ordinance Valid. N. Y. New York City passed an ordinance regu lating the use of streets for the exhibition of advertising, providing that no advertising wagons be allowed therein except ordinary business notices on wagons not used merely for advertising. The power to pass this ordinance was questioned in Fifth Avenue Coach Company v. City of New York, 86 N. E. Rep. 824. It appeared that the com pensation which the Coach Company derived from advertising was regulated by the number of coaches which it employed. This number constantly increased. From the advertising dis play alone was realized a gross income of more than six per cent on the entire capital stock. Slow moving trucks were barred from the streets owing to the congestion attending the passing of these vehicles. The New York Court of Appeals decided the ordinance within the city's power, remarking that every procession, parade or show upon vehicles passing through the public streets tends to congestion therein, and to some extent inter feres with those engaged in business. If the company had the right to so decorate its con veyances, the owner of any wagon would have the same right, which would enable the owners of vehicles to decorate them until they became a congestive menace on the thorough fares. See Public Ways. Bill of Rights. Statute Punishing Escapes from Prison—Denial of Equal Protection of Laws to Convicts. Idaho. Prisoners in Idaho attempting to escape were punishable by confinement for the term of their original sentence. If a convict was serving a one-year sentence, his punishment for escape would be one year, while a con vict serving a twenty-year sentence would be punished by being imprisoned just twenty times as long. This statute was alleged to ♦Copies of the pamphlet Reporters containing full reports of any of these decisions which are cited in the National Reporter System may be secured from the West Publishing Company, St. Paul, Minnesota, at 25 cents each. In ordering, the title of the desired case should be given as weli as the citation of volume and page of the Reporter in which it is printed.
deny equal protection to all persons charged with its violation and to be class legislation. The court held that the statute, in making the escape from the state prison the offense, and not the escape from the punishment of the judgment fixed by the court, was not natural but arbitrary. The very theory of punish ment to be imposed for crime is that it should be in proportion to the gravity of the offense. The statute was therefore held unconstitu tional by the Idaho Supreme Court in Ex parte Mallon, 102 Pac. Rep. 374. See Due Process of Law. Boundaries. Shifting Channel of River Be tween Two States. U. S. When Oregon became a state the bound ary between it and Washington was the main channel of the Columbia river. The diminish ing depth of that channel, the jetties con structed by Congress, processes of accretion and the diminution of the volume and depth of water have made another channel more important and properly the main channel. In Washington v. Oregon, 29 Sup. Ct. Rep. 631, the federal Supreme Court held that whatever changes had occurred in the former channel, its varying centre was still the true boundary, and suggested that the course of wisdom would be for the interested states to gain the consent of Congress to secure the aid of commissioners who could adjust as far as possible the jurisdiction and this elusive boundary. Capital Punishment. "Conscientious" Scruples of Juror. Wis. The question of the propriety of sustaining a challenge to a juror on the ground of his conscientious scruples against convicting a person of a capital offense on circumstantial evidence alone, arose in Spick v. State, 121 N. W. Rep. 664. The Wisconsin Supreme Court, holding a person imbued with such scruples incompetent for jury duty, remarked: "A person might as well say, generally, he has conscientious scruples against obeying the law of his country as to say he has such scruples against acting as a juror upon cir cumstantial evidence in a capital case. Such a person has too much conscience for the best of citizenship. He has that species of con science with that grade of weakness that
