In Re Clark

The petitioners were charged with, preliminarily examined before and committed for trial in the superior court by the police judge of the city of Sacramento, sitting as a committing magistrate, for the crime of grand larceny.

It is claimed by the petitioners that the magistrate was without legal authority or jurisdiction to order them committed for the crime of grand larceny, inasmuch as the evidence taken in support of the charge is wholly insufficient to establish reasonable or probable cause that said or any crime had been committed by them.

It is unnecessary to recite the facts of the transaction from which the charge preferred against the prisoners arose. It is sufficient to say that the evidence taken before the magistrate discloses that the ease involves the oft-told story of a bucolic and guileless individual, who, while waiting for a train at the Sacramento railroad station to convey him to his home in a northern town, after a brief sojourn in the central portion of the state, accommodatingly handed over to a brace of oily-tongued strangers $120 of his available cash, as a loan, after the latter had insidiously crept into and gained his confidence and were suddenly…