http://blogs.archives.gov/TextMessage/2013/05/13/defendant-jackets/
Defendant Jackets, Legal Abbreviations, and Aliases, Oh My!
What exactly is a “defendant jacket”? What does the charge “RLD” stand for? How do you find the records of a defendant if he or she had an alias or was charged with multiple co-defendants?
These are just some of the questions faced by archivists, researchers, and volunteers working with Fort Smith’s criminal case files from the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas (Record Group 21). Answers to these questions and more are now available on the “Research Guide to the Criminal Case Files of Fort Smith, Arkansas, 1866-1900.”
The court’s busy caseload and unusually large jurisdiction (74,000 square miles) make these records rich in stories from western Arkansas and the Indian Territory, today Oklahoma. The criminal case files from Fort Smith contain over 300,000 pages of court-ordered writs (arrest warrants, subpoenas, indictments, etc.) and other related court documents.
Yet, the court’s original filing system made these Wild West court cases difficult to search. Court papers from a defendant’s case file were stored in a pigeon-hole cabinet together with their co-defendants as well as other defendants with the same last name. Over time, when the pigeon holes became full, court employees transferred the contents to a numbered system of files or “jackets.” Thus, each defendant jacket contains multiple defendants and spans years. The “jacket number” became an important identifier to reference and to locate individual case files.
Two further potential problems for users were legal terminology and abbreviations found in the writs and other papers. Brushing up on your legalese will help you to identify the types of documents in a case file.
For instance, this document below comes from the case file of Bandit Queen Belle Starr and her co-defendant/husband Sam Starr. On the reverse side, the printed Latin word CAPIAS tells us it is an arrest warrant. Issued July 31, 1882, the warrant shows Deputy Marshal L.W. Marks found the pair two months later near Bird Creek in the Cherokee Nation and arrested them on September 21, 1882. [Online catalog identifier 7064406]
