Trial for Murder.
Our system of criminal jurisprudence is better than most, and as good as any with the possible exception of the English. But no one denies that it has monstrous faults. In New York recently one man shot another over a woman. Both men were rich and the woman beautiful—a combination that will instantly wreck the essential purpose of criminal law anywhere in the United States. Already the newspapers abundantly foreshadow what will happen. The material facts in the case—so far as concerns the purpose of the law to protect human life—were brought out by the coroner in about half an hour. Hereafter we shall hear very little of them.
Press reports assure us that a fine array of legal talent on either side is preparing to play a splendid game of chess. If it can be shown that one of the men led a life more vicious than the other that will score ten for the side that shows it. The sorry muck-heap of the woman’s career will be raked fore and aft until it has yielded every point that will count on one side or the other. The lawyers will construct a great melodrama, with the villain, heroine and hero, to be presented to the jury. The verdict—the very life of the accused—will depend upon the skill with which the game is played and the success with which the melodrama is “put on.”
“Thou shalt not kill,” says the commandment. One can imagine a completely civilized state, in noble dignity, requiring the one man to answer whether he did kill and murder the other, contrary to its statute. It is merely an imagining, however. Our famous murder trials, with their tawdry tricks in the face of death and their rotten plays to sentiment, are pretty exclusively barbarous.—Saturday Evening Post.