three
reversals.* (* Written in 1909.) The more important convictions
throughout the State are affirmed with great regularity.

As to the conduct of such cases, the writer's own experience is that
a murder trial is the most solemn proceeding known to the law. He has
prosecuted at least fifty men for murder, and convicted more than he
cares to remember. Such trials are invariably dignified and deliberate
so far as the conduct of the legal side of the case is concerned.
No judge, however unqualified for the bench; no prosecutor, however
light-minded; no lawyer however callous, fails to feel the serious
nature of the transaction or to be affected strongly by the fact that
he is dealing with life, and death. A prosecutor who openly laughed
or sneered at a prisoner charged with murder would severely injure his
cause. The jury, naturally, are overwhelmed with the gravity of the
occasion and the responsibility resting upon them.

In the Patterson, Thaw, and Molineux cases the evidence, unfortunately,
dealt with unpleasant subjects and at times was revolting, but there was
a quiet propriety in the way in which the witnesses were examined
that rendered it as inoffensive as it could possibly be. Outside the
court-room the vulgar crowd may have spat and sworn; and inside no doubt
there were degenerate men and women who eagerly strained their ears to
catch every item of depravity. But the throngs that filled the courtroom
were quiet and well ordered, and the justified interested outnumbered
the morbid.

The writer deprecates the impulse which leads judges, from a feeling
that justice should be publicly administered, to throw wide the doors
of every courtroom, irrespective of the subject-matter of the trial. We
need have no fear of Star Chamber proceedings in America, and no harm
would be done by excluding from the courtroom all persons who have no
business there.

It is, of course, not unnatural that in the course of a trial occupying
weeks or months the tension should occasionally be relieved by a gleam
of humor. After one has been busy trying a case for a couple of weeks
one goes to court and sets to work in much the same frame of mind in
which one would attack any other business. But the fact that a small
boy sometimes sees something funny at a funeral, or a bevy of giggling
shop-girls may be sitting in the gallery at a fashionable wedding,
argues little in respect to the solemnity or beauty of the service
itself.

What a