lawlessness which, if examined calmly and solely from the
point of view of the evidence, would be found to be the
reasonable acts of honest and intelligent juries.

For example, the acquittal of Thaw upon the ground of insanity
is usually spoken of as an illustration of sentimentality on
the part of jurymen, and of their willingness to be swayed by
their emotions where a woman is involved. But few clearer
cases of insanity have been established in a court of justice.
The district attorney's own experts had pronounced the
defendant a hopeless paranoiac; the prosecutor had, at a
previous trial, openly declared the same to be his own
opinion; and the evidence was convincing. At the time it was
rendered, the verdict was accepted as a foregone conclusion.
To-day the case is commonly cited as proof of the gullibility
of juries and of the impossibility of convicting a rich man of
a crime.

There will always be some persons who think that every
defendant should be convicted and feel aggrieved if he is
turned out by the jury. Yet they entirely forget, in their
displeasure at the acquittal of a man whom they instinctively
"know" to be guilty, that the jury probably had exactly the
same impression, but were obliged under their oaths to acquit
because of an insufficiency of evidence.

An excellent illustration of such a case is that of Nan
Patterson. She is commonly supposed to have attended, upon
the night of her acquittal, a banquet at which one of her
lawyers toasted her as "the guilty girl who beat the case."