of the States said there was no possible doubt, secured
three new trials and was finally acquitted on the fourth, it merely
demonstrated how perfectly we safeguarded the rights of the individual.

The result is that we have unnecessarily fettered ourselves, have
furnished a multitude of technical avenues of escape to wrong-doers,
and have created a popular contempt for courts of justice, which shows
itself in the sentimental and careless verdicts of juries, in a lack
of public spirit, and in an indisposition to prosecute wrong-doers. In
addition, the impression sought to be conveyed by the yellow press
that our judiciary is corrupt and that money can buy anything--even
justice--leads the jury in many cases to feel that their presence is
merely a formal concession to an archaic procedure and that their oaths
have no real significance.

The community, the "People," have a sufficiently hard task to secure
justice at any criminal trial. On the one hand is the abstract
proposition that the law has been violated, on the other sits a human
being, ofttimes contrite, always an object of pity. He is presumed
innocent, he is to be given the benefit of every reasonable doubt. He
has the right to make his own powerful appeal to the jury and to have
the services of the best lawyer he can secure to sway their emotions
and their sympathies. If the prosecutor resorts to eloquence he is
stigmatized as "over-zealous" and as a "persecutor." If a plainly guilty
defendant be acquitted, not the trampled ideal of justice, but the
vision of a liberated prisoner rejoicing in his freedom hovers in the
talesman's dreams.

So far so good; we can afford to stand by a system which in the long run
has served us fairly well. But an occasional evil, an evil which when
it occurs is productive of great harm and serves to give color to the
popular opinion of criminal law, begins only when the lawyers have had
their opportunity for elocution. At the conclusion of the charge
the defendant's attorney proceeds to put the judge through what is
familiarly known as "a course of sprouts." He makes twenty or thirty
"requests to charge the jury" on the most abstract propositions of law
which his fertile mind can devise,--relevant or irrelevant, applicable
or inapplicable to the facts,--and the judge is compelled to decide
from the bench, without opportunity for reflection, questions which the
attorney has labored upon, perchance, for weeks. If he guesses wrong,