An Associated Press report, as seen in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune:
Will Not Pay 63-Cent Tax, Goes To Jail
Boston, —(AP)— Patrick Quinn, 67, Cambridge stationary fireman, who went to jail yesterday rather than pay a 63 cent income tax he contended he didn’t owe, was released today when an unidentified person paid the amount to the state tax collector.
Had Quinn remained in jail it would have cost the state 50 cents a day for his keep. Authorities could not release him on bail as a state law decrees persons arrested on tax warrants may not be bailed. About 35 cents of the tax bill was interest.
The elderly widower told jailers after his arrest that he would “rot in jail” before he’d pay.
A brief note in the New York Times, not yet freely on-line, quoted Quinn as saying: “If they’re going to keep me in jail until I pay that 63 cents, then they better start measuring me for a wooden box.”
Another report says “an attractive young woman, whose name tax officials declined to reveal,” paid the fine, whereupon the jailers let Quinn (“a little dazed… by the quick succession of events”) go, and, as the reporter’s poetic license would have it, had to “gently, but firmly urge[] Quinn onto the sidewalk” and “unceremoniously shut the doors behind him before he could remonstrate.”
That article also gives a little more detail about Quinn’s beef:
A man who had “political pull,” he explained in jail, cheated him back in out of $3,900, his life savings. He said State officials would not help him get the money back “but it seems the whole State was ready to work on me because they claimed I owed the state 63 cents.”
State tax commissioner Henry F. Long said the tax Quinn refused to pay was the 10 per cent surtax levied by the Legislature on incomes after the regular tax bills had been sent out. He said Quinn paid his regular tax, but refused to pay the surtax, declaring the State had no right to levy the additional sum.
Surprisingly, Quinn’s tax resistance and jailing seems to have been somewhat effective at meeting his grievances:
Attorney General Paul A. Dever said he had assigned an assistant, Maurice M. Goldman, to investigate Quinn’s claim that he had been “cheated” and to determine all the facts surrounding the arrest.
The investigation, Dever added, would include questioning of the Deputy Tax Collector who placed Quinn in jail.
