Courts and Criminals

by Arthur Cheney Train

What are 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 is perfectly clear against the prisoner, the "yellow" press seeks to bolster up the defence and really to justify the killing by a thinly disguised appeal to the readers' passions. Not infrequently, while the editorial page is mourning the prevalence of homicide, the front columns are bristling with sensational accounts of the home-coming of the injured husband, the heartbreaking confession of the weak and erring wife, and the sneering nonchalance of the seducer, until a public sentiment is created which, if it outwardly deprecates the invocation of the unwritten law, secretly avows that it would have done the same thing in the prisoner's place.

This antecedent public sentiment is fostered from day to day until it has unconsciously permeated every corner of the community. The juryman will swear that he is unaffected by what he has read, but unknown to himself there are already tiny furrows in his brain along which the appeal of the defence will run.

In view of this deliberate perversion of truth and morals, the euphemisms of a hard-put defendant's counsel when he pictures a chorus girl as an angel and a coarse bounder as a St. George seem innocent indeed. It is not within the rail of the courtroom but within the pages of these sensational journals that justice is made a farce. The phrase "contempt of court" has ceased practically to have any significance whatever. The front pages teem with caricatures of the judge upon the bench, of the individual jurors with exaggerated heads upon impossible bodies, of the lawyers ranting and bellowing, juxtaposed with sketches of the defendant praying beside his prison cot or firing the fatal shot in obedience to a message borne by an angel from on high.