the highest court in one of the States said there was no
possible doubt, secured three new trials and was finally
acquitted on the fourth, it merely demonstrated how perfectly
we safeguarded the rights of the individual.

The result is that we have unnecessarily fettered ourselves,
have furnished a multitude of technical avenues of escape to
wrong-doers, and have created a popular contempt for courts of
justice, which shows itself in the sentimental and careless
verdicts of juries, in a lack of public spirit, and in an
indisposition to prosecute wrong-doers. In addition, the
impression sought to be conveyed by the yellow press that our
judiciary is corrupt and that money can buy anything--even
justice--leads the jury in many cases to feel that their
presence is merely a formal concession to an archaic procedure
and that their oaths have no real significance.

The community, the "People," have a sufficiently hard task to
secure justice at any criminal trial. On the one hand is the
abstract proposition that the law has been violated, on the
other sits a human being, ofttimes contrite, always an object
of pity. He is presumed innocent, he is to be given the
benefit of every reasonable doubt. He has the right to make
his own powerful appeal to the jury and to have the services
of the best lawyer he can secure to sway their emotions and
their sympathies. If the prosecutor resorts to eloquence he
is stigmatized as "over-zealous" and as a "persecutor." If a
plainly guilty defendant be acquitted, not the trampled ideal
of justice, but the vision of a liberated prisoner rejoicing
in his freedom hovers in the talesman's dreams.