Sargent v. Carroll

Steaming gruel, juicy lamb chops, southern -cooked biscuits, crisp bacon all went into Room 19 and came back almost untouched. Doctors, nurses, urged the patient to eat, but Earl Carroll would only turn his head away, answer: "I can't, I can't." In some two months his weight had dropped from 145 to 130 pounds. Propped up on his pillows, eyes closed, long wisps of hair straggling across his high forehead, he lay in what one observer called a state of "cell shock," his mind apparently focussed on the prison sentence that lay before him.

His evenings, though, were brighter than his days. At about 10 p. m. his wife, Marcelle, would call, with his brother, Norman, and his sister-in-law. (Visiting hours were theoretically from 7 to 8, but not for the Carrolls.) The visitors left usually about midnight, and then Room 19 would be,, quiet until, in the morning, three sharp buzzes told the nurse that the patient was awake. But he took little interest in anything except the Manhattan newspapers, which usually came out from his room with theatrical and social items clipped from them.

Meanwhile in a nearby room stayed Deputy Marshall Henry Cunningham, assigned to "guard" the patient. It was rather a sinecure position--in fact, the Deputy spent much of his time strolling about Greenville, and watching the goldfish in the fountain before the hospital. There were six goldfish and the deputy (said despatches) amused themselves thinking up names for them.

So, for two months, lay Earl Carroll, Manhattan theatrical producer, sentenced to a year and a day in Atlanta Penitentiary after being convicted of perjury in connection with Miss Joyce Hawley's famed champagne bath at the Carroll party of Feb. 22, 1926. Collapsing en route to Atlanta (April 13), he had been taken to the Greenville (S. C.) Hospital, had there remained.

Then last week, came orders from Attorney General John Garibaldi Sargent that Mr. Carroll should be removed from hospital to penitentiary, should change from patient to prisoner. While his wife protested against the "inhumanity" to the prisoner, while his brother described the removal order as coming with "brutal suddenness," Mr. Carroll was taken to Atlanta, where an ambulance met his train at the station and took him to the prison.

Said Attorney General Sargent (after reading reports of government physicians who had examined Mr. Carroll): "There is nothing in his condition according to the reports of the physicians, that should interfere with his removal. . . . We felt we should be perfectly considerate and we have been."

The Attorney General said also that he saw no reason for referring Mr. Carroll's case to the President (for executive clemency) and that his sentence would begin from the time he entered the jail, not from the time he entered the hospital. So Earl Carroll entered Atlanta, was taken to the prison hospital, became No. 24,909. Despatches said that when he regains his health he will be given the position of bath house orderly.