ll its other social questions seem temporary
and superficial.

V

THE MIND OF THE JURYMAN

Every lawyer knows some good stories about some wild juries he has
known, which made him shiver and doubt whether a dozen laymen ever can
see a legal point. But every newspaper reader, too, remembers an
abundance of cases in which the decision of the jury startled him by
its absurdity. Who does not recall sensational acquittals in which
sympathy for the defendant or prejudice against the plaintiff carried
away the feelings of the twelve good men and true? For them are the
unwritten laws, for them the mingling of justice with race hatreds or
with gallantry. And even in the heart of New York a judge recently
said to a chauffeur who had killed a child and had been acquitted:
"Now go and get drunk again; then this jury will allow you to run over
as many children as you like."

Yet whatever the temperament of the jury and its legal insight, we may
sharply separate its ideas of deserved punishment from that far more
important aspect of its function, the weighing of evidence. The
juries may be whimsical in their decisions, they may be lenient in
their acquittals or over-rigid in their verdicts of guilty, but that
is quite in keeping with the democratic spirit of the institution. The
Teutonic nations did not want the abstract law of the scholarly
judges; they want the pulse-beat of life throbbing in the court
decisions, and what may be a wilful ignoring of the law of the jurists
may be a heartfelt expression of the popular sentiment. Better to have
some statutes riddled by the illogical verdicts than legal decisions
severed from the sense of justice which is living in the soul of the
nation. But while a rush into prejudice or a hasty overriding of law
may draw attention to some exceptional verdicts, in the overwhelming
mass of jury decisions nothing is aimed at but a real clearing up of
the facts. The evidence is submitted, and while the lawyers may have
wrangled as to what is evidence and what is not, and while they may
have tried, by their presentation of the witnesses on their own side
and by their cross-examinations, to throw light on some parts of the
evidence and shadow on some others, the jurymen are simply to seek the
truth when all the evidence has been submitted. And mostly they do not
forget that they will live up to their duty best the more they
suppress i