re the celebrated cases--the trials that attract the attention
and interest of the public? In the first place, they are the very cases
which contain those elements most likely to arouse the sympathy and
prejudices of a jury--where a girl has taken the life of her supposed
seducer, or a husband has avenged his wife's alleged dishonor. Such
cases arouse the public imagination for the very reason that every
man realizes that there are two sides to every genuine tragedy of
this character--the legal and the natural. Thus, aside from any other
consideration, they are the obvious instances where justice is most
likely to go astray.

In the next place, the defence is usually in the hands of counsel of
adroitness and ability; for even if the prisoner has no money to pay his
lawyer, the latter is willing to take the case for the advertising he
will get out of it.

Third, a trial which lasts for a long time naturally results in creating
in the jury's mind an exaggerated idea of the prisoner's rights, namely,
the presumption of innocence and the benefit of the reasonable doubt.
For every time that the jury will hear these phrases once in a petty
larceny or forgery case, they will hear them in a lengthy murder trial
a hundred times. They see the defendant day after day, and the relation
becomes more personal. Their responsibility seems greater toward him
than toward the defendant in petty cases.

Last, as previously suggested, murder cases are apt to be inherently
weaker than others, and more often depend upon circumstantial evidence.

The results of such cases are therefore an inadequate test of the
efficiency of a jury system. They are, in fact, the precise cases where,
if at all, the jury might be expected to go wrong.

But juries would go astray far less frequently even in such trials were
it not for that most vicious factor in the administration of criminal
justice--the "yellow" journal. For the impression that public trials
are the scenes of buffoonery and brutality is due to the manner in which
these trials are exploited by the sensational papers.

The instant that a sensational homicide occurs, the aim of the editors
of these papers is--not to see that a swift and sure retribution is
visited upon the guilty, or that a prompt and unqualified vindication is
accorded to the innocent, but, on the contrary, so to handle the matter
that as many highly colored "stories" as possible can be run about it.

Thus, where the case