the lawyer "excepts" and the case may be reversed on appeal. This is not
a test of the defendant's guilt or innocence, but a test of the abstract
learning and quickness of the presiding judge.

It is generally believed that appellate courts are prone to reverse
criminal cases on purely technical grounds. Whether this belief be well
founded or ill, its wide acceptance as fact is fertile in bringing the
law into disrepute.* Justice to be effective must be not only sure but
swift. An "iron hand" cannot always compensate for a "leaden heel".

*Cf. "Criminal Law Reform," G.W. Alger, "The Outlook," June, 1907. Also
article having same title in "Moral Overstrain," by same author.
See also, by Hon. C.F. Amidon, "The Quest for Error and the doing of
Justice," 40 American Law Rev. 681, and article on same subject in "The
Outlook" for June, 1906.

It is probably true that in some of the States such a tendency exists
and may result in making the administration of justice a laughing stock,
but it is far from being so in States of the character of New York and
Massachusetts. The Appellate Division, First Department, and Court of
Appeals in New York are distinctly opposed to reversing criminal cases
on technical grounds and are prone to disregard trivial error where
the guilt of the defendant is clear. The writer can recall no recent
criminal case where the district attorney's office has felt aggrieved at
the action of the higher courts, and on the contrary believes that
their action is generally based on broad principles of public policy and
common-sense.

During the year 1905 the district attorney of New York County defended
forty-seven appeals from convictions in criminal cases in the Appellate
Division. Of these convictions only three were reversed. He defended
eighteen in the Court of Appeals, of which only two were reversed. One
of the writer's associates computed that he had secured, during a four
years' term of office, twenty-nine convictions in which appeals had been
taken. Of these but two were reversed, one of them immediately resulting
in the defendant's re-conviction for the same crime. The other is still
pending and the defendant awaiting his trial. Certainly there is little
in the actual figures to give color to the impression that the criminal
profits by mere technicalities on appeal,--at least in New York State.

In nine cases out of ten the reversal of a conviction in a criminal case
is due to the care