Ex parte Reilly

Petitioner was arrested, tried, and convicted upon a charge of battery alleged to have been committed in the city of Los Angeles. The trial took place before a justice of the peace who styles himself ex officio police judge of the city of Los Angeles, and who appears to have been acting as such police judge by designation of the mayor, in pursuance of the so-called Whitney act, which it was intimated in the first decision in People v. Toal, 23 Pac. Rep. 203, applied to the city of Los Angeles. The claim of petitioner is, that his imprisonment is illegal, because, under the freeholders’…