PEREMPTORY CHALLENGES.
Mr. Grinnell said he thought it to be conceded that a State Legislature had a right to prescribe how many peremptory challenges should be allowed in the formation of a jury. The common law of Illinois had been radically changed in this respect, and both prosecution and defendant now stood on an equal footing. Each defendant was entitled to twenty peremptory challenges, and as the eight defendants in this case acted in concert and were all consulted, each of them had practically 160 peremptory challenges. The State had a like number. The defendants exhausted all of their 160 peremptory challenges before a jury was obtained and the State availed itself of its priviledgeprivilege to the extent of fifty-two challenges. He maintained, however, that no federal question would be involved even if the State allowed only one peremptory challenge to one side and 160 to the other. It was the State’s right. In this case there were 931 men called into the jury box and examined in order to obtain twelve jurors.
JURORS SANFORD AND DENKER.
No objection was raised to any one of the twelve jurors with the single exception of Sanford. Denker was challenged for cause after a brief examination; the challenge was overruled and the defense accepted, but they then proceeded with a further and more elaborate examination of him, and it is shown by the record that after this second examination they desired to keep him, that they did keep him, and that they did make no further exception. When Denker was taken the defense had left 142 peremptory challenges and they could have used one of these challenges to get rid of him if they had been very deirsousdesirous of so doing. They had forty-three peremptory challenges left after eleven jurors had been sworn. These forty-three challenges they frittered away frivolously for the purpose of taking some possible advantage. Their peremptory challenges were then exhausted, and they had to either take a juror or show cause why he should be rejected.
The examination of Sanford, the last juror, clearly demonstrated, Mr. Grinnell said, that the defense were more ready to take him than the State was. Not a single juror was put upon the defense to exhaust their peremptory challenges. Whenever a man said that he had talked with a witness or any one who was present at the Haymarket meeting, or that he had attended the coroner’s inquest he was rejected for cause.
EULOGIZING THE JURY.
Speaking of the jury as a whole, Mr. Grinnell said: “I wish and am constrained to pay one tribute to that jury. It exemplified American citizenship in this country more than any jury that was ever looked upon. It embraced all walks of life. Three of them earned their living by manual work. They came from all parts of the country and one of them was born on foreign soil. They were not a class jury. They were honest citizens with the solemn duty devolving upon them of determining what should be done with those men. No judge could look in the faces of that jury without saying: ‘They are intelligent; they represent American citizenship; they are fit to be trusted with the rights of freemen under our constitution.’ There was not a capitalist on that jury. They were all common-place small dealers and intelligent men.”
Mr. Grinnell said he would challenge any one to show that a single member of that jury was not a competent juror, not only under the jury law of Illinois, but under the common law. “Congress,” he said, “had recognized the right of States to make their own jury laws.”
Section 800 of the Revised Statutes provides that “jurors to serve in the courts of the United States in each State respectively shall have thethe same qualifications and be entitled to the same exemptions as jurors of the highest court of law in such State may have and be entitled to at the time when such jurors for service in the courts of the United State are summoned.”
Almost every State in the North, he said, now had its new jury law, and these laws have been sustained by the highest State courts.