One must refer to the Code of Criminal Procedure in order to study the subject of wagering. Gaming is a crime at common law and by statute. The power to suppress gambling is one that society has always honored. It is the power to prevent crime.
Bets, stakes and wagers, horse racing, bookmaking, together with taverns, public houses and bars, have always been elements of the dark side of society, to be shunned and despised, places of offense.Duplicity - double dealing - is the human weakness that underlies most gaming. Some people may look upon the victims of such evil as accomplices, but where two persons wager on the result of an event, as a horse race, one is not the accomplice of the other, since to establish that relation, two or more persons must unite in a common purpose to do an unlawful act, and when two persons wager on the result of a certain event, the purpose of each is diametrically opposed to that of the other.
My purpose in writing this letter is to say that pari-mutuel wagering within the United States has failed. The New York Times said that earnings by horse racers are down 48 percent, and most people who rely on wagering for their livelihood are insolvent.
Some of these people, in hoping to legalize racing in Utah, also hope to have their multimillion-dollar expenses covered by the taxpayers.
To a people panhandled to distraction by the Olympics organizers and other mendicants, this should be intolerable.
Beggary aside, my concern is for the victims of pari-mutuel wagering. Gaming as crime has to do with wagering contracts or transactions entered into with the horse owners by persons of low income in exchange for a chance to bet on a horse. A bettor really has no right of recovery of money or property lost. There is little or no relief from gambling contracts, even those that are oral. A man who uses his home as collateral to guarantee a chance to bet will find that his agreement was in fact a bill of sale.
No person should approve of legalizing pari-mutuel wagering. It is pari-mutuel suicide.
Mary Jean Freebairn
Salt Lake City