Sloan Free On Charge Of Rioting

Case Against Mine Workers' Union President Dismissed by Magistrate Martin.

A charge of rioting, arising out of the melee which took place in Estevan on Sept, 29, and on which Sam Scarlett and more than a dozen other alleged participants have already been committed for trial, was dismissed yesterday against James Sloan, president of the Mine Workers' Union of Canada.
THe preliminary hearing took placein the Town Hall auditorium before Magistrate J. C. Martin, K.C., of Weyburn. W.J. Perkins, crown prosecutor, conducted the case, and W. H. Heffernan, Regina barrister, appeared for Sloan.

Nattily Attired The dapper little Scotchman, sporting a pair of Jaunty new pearl-grey spats, heard without any show of enthusiasm the words which left him a free man after nearly two months of hiding which eded with his surrender last Thursday afternoon.
"The accused was undoubtedly in a position where suspicion would fall on him," said Magistrate Martin in giving his decision at 7.30 p.m. after an adjournment, "but my feeling is that were I to commit him for trial, I should be doing so on suspicion only."
Punctuated by frequent interjections and strenuous objections from Sloan's counsel, the hearing held the close attention of a well-filled courtroom for three hours. A total of 11 witnesses were called by the crown. Inspector Moorehead of Regina, who was in charge of the large R.C.M.P. detachment stationed here during the strike, was in the audience.

Telegram Entered A.B. Stuart, town clerk of Estevan, was the first witness called, reading the minutes of a special meeting of the Council on the morning of Sept. 29, at which resolutions forbidding a parade of the miners throught the town and the renting of the town hall for a public meeting by either the operators or the strikers, had been passed. He produced a copy of a telegram which he had dispatched to Sloan at Bienfait, advising him of hese resolutions, and also a copy of the letter sent to Sloan confirming the telegram. J. H. Thrift and Earl Goddard, Canadian Pacific Railway employees at Estevan and Bienfait, respectively, later testifed that the telegram had been trasmitted. Goddard told of going to the sotre of Wm. Adler in Bienfait to deliveer the message to Sloan. The latter had not been in evidence, he said, but Adler had taken the telegram in to him and had returned in a few moments with Sloan's signature on a receipt for the wire.
Arthur Graham, overseer of Bienfait, Stanley Lang., Bienfait merchant, and Joseph Erumovitch, Bienfait barber, all told of seeing Sloan on the streets of their village prior to the parade of the miners to Estevan. He had been talking with groups of men. There was no evidence that he was organizing the parade, which ended in the death of three miners when a clash occurered with police on the streets of Estevan. Nnone of them had seen Sloan in the parade, and Graham had seen him in Bienfait twenty minutes after it left.

Not On Committee Evidence of Martin Day and John Adam, employees of the Crescent mine, stated that Sloan had come to the Coalfields from Calgary at the request of the miners to assist in the draffting of wage schedules and working conditions for negotitation with the operators. He had not been on the committee which had organized the parade, and had not taken part in it.
Concerning the decision of Estevan Town Council that the parade owuld not be permitted, Day testified that Sloan had not notified the miners of the contents of the telegram he had recieved, and that they had no knowledge that they were taking part in an unlawful assembly. Another witness, Thos. Baker, also and employee of the Cresecent Mine, declared that he had heard Sloan make a speech priopr to the riot in which he urged all the miners to attend a parade if there were one, because the police "would not harm them or shoot at them."
Wm. Adler, Bienfait merchant, testified that Sloan had been in his store when the parade left, and that he had remained there all afternoon.
A telephone conversation on the morning of Sept. 29 between himself and Sloan, who was in Bienfait, by Chief of Police McCutchean, who had told the Union president that the Council had decided to forbid the parade. He described the riot which took place that afternoon, in which three miners received fatal wounds and nine or 10 policemen were injured. Cross-examined by Sloan's counsel he flatly denied having been drinking the day of the riot. He had not seen Sloan in the parade. He could not remember Sloan saying to him over the telephone that the "parade was entirely int he hands of the miners."

Union Leader Staff Sergeant Mortimer, R.C.M.P., had seen Sloan at a public meeting in Bienfait on Sept. 27, at which Sam Scarlett and Annie Buller had given addresses, but had not heard him speak. He knoew the accused as the leader and direcotr of the Miners' Union activites.
Presenting the case for the crown, W. J. Perkins declared that the accused had known the parade was forbidden, but had suppressed information, so that the miners did not know they were unlawfully asssembled.
"The suppression of that information was the cause of the riot," he contended, and was to blame for the deaths of the three men, and the injuries of the others. Sloan was responsible, the trend of the evidence showed. Mr. Heffernan countered with the assertion that Sloan had come to the Coalfields from Calgary as an expert on wage schedules. There was nothing in the evidence to prove that he had had anything to do with the riot, and for that reason a dismissal of the charge was asked.