"Stop!" cried Cohalan feebly; "that's quite enough. Don't you do anything but read the papers?"
The little old man regarded the lawyer scornfully.
"I spend six hours a day keeping myself informed of what is going on. I flatter myself that there is nothing in the whole world with which I am not fully acquainted. Knowledge is power!"
Cohalan collapsed into his seat.
"That is all. You are excused. You know too much for us!"
As the little old man shuffled off he whispered to the prosecutor:
"I'd have given the —— twenty years!"
On the other hand, the hyper-sensitiveness of counsel renders it easy for talesmen to escape who do not wish to serve. The writer knows an estimable man who is regularly drawn about four times a year upon the special jury. He has never served. His method is as follows: Having taken his seat upon the witness-stand he wrinkles his forehead and looks fiercely at the defendant. When asked if he has any objection to capital punishment he thrusts out his under jaw and exclaims: "I should say not! I think hangin's too good for 'em!" In reality he is the mildest, the most sympathetic and the "easiest" of human beings. Another observant talesman who appears periodically has learned, the writer believes, his trick from the first. His stock reply to the same question relative to capital punishment is, "I have not. I believe in the Biblical injunction of 'an eye for an eye,' and 'a tooth for a tooth,' and, 'Whoso sheddeth man's blood by man shall his blood be shed.'" Needless to say, he leaves the stand with the same alacrity as the other. Jurors readily enter into friendly relations with the prosecutor and defendant's counsel, but rarely with any effect upon their verdicts. In the first trial of Mock Duck, a Chinaman indicted for murder, where the defence interposed was an alibi, to wit, that the prisoner had been buying a terrapin in Fulton Market at the time of the commission of the crime (whence the prosecutor claimed that it was the case of a Mock Duck with a mock turtle defence), a juryman met the defendant's counsel during recess and told him that there was no further need for him to call any more witnesses for the defendant, as the jury "understood the situation perfectly." The lawyer took the hint, and upon the reopening of court closed his case, feeling sure of an acquittal or at least of a disagreement. When the jury had retired the talesman in question made a long speech in favor of murder in the first degree, and refused to vote for any other crime. Such performances are rare. Of course, it not infrequently occurs that a juror by his manner of asking questions shows plainly his state of mind. The feelings of a prosecutor can be easily imagined when a juror turns in disgust from one of the People's witnesses, or those of a defendant's counsel when another, looking towards the prisoner, grinds his teeth as the evidence goes in and ejaculates, "Brute!"
The jury offers a fertile field for the study of human nature, and lawyers and prosecutors learn to look regularly for certain characters. Of these may be mentioned the too officious juror who asks hundreds of incompetent and irrelevant questions to which the lawyers are naturally afraid to object, and whose inquisitiveness has to be curbed by the court itself. Such a juror usually shows much conviction one way or the other in the early stages of the case, and before he has heard the evidence. Unfortunately his executive abilities usually fill the balance of the jury with such disgust that to have a juror of this sort on one's side is more of a misfortune than a boon.
Jurors of this variety frequently at inopportune moments interrupt counsel during their addresses. In one case an aggressive talesman broke in upon a burst of carefully prepared eloquence with the brutal interrogation: "How about the knife?" The counsel stopped, bowed to the juror, smiled, and said calmly: "Thank you, Mr. Smith, I'm glad you spoke of that. I am coming to it in a moment." The juror, satisfied, leaned back contentedly, but the lawyer has not "come" to the knife yet.