[22] Misdemeanors Disposed of During the Year 1907.
| Convicted | 1,853 |
| Acquitted | 1,045 |
| Plead Guilty | 6,107 |
| Discharged | 502 |
| Demurrers allowed | 1 |
| Forfeited | 457 |
| Actions dismissed | 3,175 |
| ——— | |
| Total | 13,140 |
[23] See note, infra, p. 210.
THE GRAND JURY
The constitutions and laws of most of the States of the Union provide that no person shall be tried for a felony unless he shall first have been indicted for his offence by a grand jury. The defendant may have been caught in the very act, have freely acknowledged his guilt to the officer who arrested him, have admitted it before the magistrate, and have signed a full and complete confession of his crime in every detail, yet he cannot be placed on trial or his plea of guilty received until a body of twenty-three intelligent, but exceedingly busy, gentlemen, sitting together in a secluded chamber, have solemnly deliberated upon the case. If they agree with the prisoner in his contention that he is guilty they thereupon file a diffuse and perplexing document to that effect, which they have not read, and probably would not understand if they had. The proceeding has cost the county some additional expense and the defendant a day or two longer in jail, and he has still to be tried before a petit jury, where the evidence must be presented again at the greatest length, and where the grand jury's action cannot be considered in any way as affecting the issue. If, on the other hand, the prisoner contends that he is innocent, and yet the magistrate who has heard the case thinks otherwise, the same twenty-three gentlemen, hearing, as a general rule, only the evidence in his disfavor, will almost inevitably return a true bill against him, and he will be put to his trial. Of all the features of modern criminal procedure, bar only the office of coroner, the grand jury, or "The Grand Inquest," as it is called, is the most archaic. While without any doubt in thinly populated districts it may still be of value, in crowded cities like New York, where the volume of criminal business is overwhelming, it has in large measure ceased to be either effective or desirable so far as the ordinary run of criminal cases is concerned.
Some States manage to dispense entirely with the services of the grand jury. The prosecutor receives the complaint against the accused directly from the committing magistrate, files an information and puts the prisoner on trial. Truly this would seem both cheap and expeditious.
Among the dusty archives of the Court of General Sessions lie a pile of parchment-bound volumes which contain the earliest minutes of criminal proceedings in the county. The first page of the most ancient of these presents an account of the empanelling of the first grand jury of which any record now remains in New York. It reads as follows: