are convicted than of men
charged with the same offence. To read the newspapers one would suppose
that the mere fact that the defendant was a female instantly paralyzed
the minds of the jury and reduced them to a state of imbecility. The
inevitable result of this must be to encourage lawlessness among the
lower orders of women and to lead them to look upon arrest as a mere
formality without ultimate significance. The writer recalls trying for
murder a negress who had shot her lover not long after the discharge of
a notorious female defendant in a recent spectacular trial in New York.
When asked why she had killed him she replied:

"Oh, Nan Patterson did it and got off."

This is not offered as a reflection upon the failure of the jury
to reach a verdict in the Patterson case, but as an illuminating
illustration of the concrete and immediate effect of all actual or
supposed failures of justice.

A belief that the course of criminal justice is slow and uncertain, that
the chances are all in favor of the defendant, and that he has but
to resort to technicalities to secure not only indefinite delay but
generally ultimate freedom, breeds an indifference amounting almost to
arrogance among law-breakers, powerful and otherwise, and a painful yet
hopeless conviction among honest men that nothing can prevent the wicked
from flourishing. Honesty seems no longer even a good policy, and
the young business man resorts to sharp practices to get ahead of his
unscrupulous competitor. In some localities the uncertainty and delay
attendant upon the execution of the law is the alleged and maybe
the actual, cause of the community crime of lynching. Even where the
administration of justice is seen at its best many people who have been
wronged believe that there is so little likelihood that the offender
will after all be punished that the cheapest and easiest course is to
let the matter drop. All this gives aid and comfort to the powers of
darkness.

The widespread impression as to the uncertainty of the law is not
entirely a misapprehension. "We have long since passed the period when
it is possible to punish an innocent man. We are now struggling with the
problem whether it is any longer possible to punish the guilty." It is
a melancholy fact that at the present time "penal statutes and procedure
tend more to defeat and retard the ends of justice than to protect the
rights of the accused."

The subject of criminal-law reform is too ex