ONE LESSON OF TWO RECENT TRIALS. A LONDON juryman the other
day told a story which . seemed to its hearers a little surprising, as well as comic. He had been listening with much attention to a case of some importance, in which the subject-matter of trial subsequently became the occasion of much comment in the journals, and the evidence for the plaintiff had just been completed, when a piece of paper was thrust into his finger. It proved to be a suggestion from a fellow-juryman, that as there could be no doubt of the result, the case should be stopped, and that the jury, declaring themselves satisfied, should at once deliver a verdict. The impatient juryman was quieted with some difficulty and many whispered anathemas, and the story was told as an illus- tration of the precipitance of uneducated judgment. It • was not a bad illustration, but we fear it might be repeated of educated jurymen as well. At least, if it might not, jurymen are intellectually much the superiors of their countrymen outside the Courts, who, whether educated or uneducated, are learning to rush to conclusions with a rapidity which threatens before long to im- pair the utility of Courts of Justice. It is not a month since Earl Russell, being defendant in a suit for judicial separation, was within seventy-two hours hooted and applauded by the same mob in the same place. His wife had given evidence against him, and the populace of the Strand at once made up its mind that the Earl was the vilest of mankind, and without waiting for rebutting evidence, or charge from the Judge, or verdict, endeavoured to make its indignation executive. By good luck, and the help of the police in the Strand, Lord Russell escaped with his limbs unbroken, and the trial was enabled to proceed without an adjournment for his recovery in hospital. A few hours afterwards, his side was heard, and he was able to prove that, although his career had not been wholly unstained, he was, as regards his wife's charges, blameless ; the Judge charged strongly in his favour ; and the jury gave him a verdict, whereupon he left the Court to receive an ovation on the same spot from the very people who, on ex pane evidence, had been ready to take his life.
That is, of course, accepted as proof of the precipitance and senselessness of the uneducated, but we really are not sure that the educated are one whit more careful than the ignorant whom they deride. In the Pearl Case which has this week so interested and amazed Londoners, the edu- cated certainly made up their minds as rapidly as any mob ever did. On Saturday, they had not heard a word of the defendants' case, and already the defendants and all con- nected with them, were, as it appeared hopelessly, ruined in public estimation. The plaintiff, Mrs. Osborne, had appeared in the box, and what with her look of inno- cence, and her perfect serenity and frankness in meeting cross-examination, she had carried the audience by storm. The Bar, the reporters, the spectators, and, we fear, the jury, all made up their minds alike. The Judge says he was all through of a contrary opinion, and one or two much-experienced barristers may have held their judgments in suspense ; but in the hundred thousand households which on Sunday discussed the mystery, not 10 per cent., or 5 per cent., hesitated as to their verdict. Major Hargreave might have taken the pearls, or Mrs. Hargreave might have sold them, or Mr. Engelhart, or conceivably some one informed by either of the three; but certainly Mrs. Osborne had not. Her adversaries were torn in conversation to pieces, and entered the Court on Tuesday without a rag of reputation remaining, so completely stripped bare of presumptive con- fidence, that if they had been witnesses in another case on the Monday, no juryman would have placed reliance on their evidence. Yet all the while Mrs. Osborne was guilty. On Tuesday, her plea was withdrawn, with apologies from her much-to-be-pitied husband and counsel ; and it was seen, past the shadow of doubt, that her greatly con- demned adversaries had behaved not only with upright- ness but with kindly consideration, and had in the witness- box told the simple truth. Major Hargreave's "confused way" of giving evidence was only the result of a deadly cross-examination by Sir Charles Russell ; and the impro- babilities of Mrs. Hargreave's story were all reconciled by the fact that the central impossibility was true. The trial ended in a shower of apologies from counsel, not a whit too strong for the circumstances ; and in those apologies the whole educated public might fairly have been required to take a share.
As it happened, the charge being really one of theft, though nominally one of slander, the mob, which regards thieves as natural products of the social system, did not intervene, and the comments of the educated for one day did not injure the defendants ; but we would just ask how it would have been with them had Messrs. Benjamin's people been less attentive to trials, or if Mrs. Osborne had not signed two of the bank-notes which she had obtained for the pearls. We venture to say, that whatever the verdict might have been, the Hargreave household never would or could have obtained justice from the com- munity, which, after making up its mind as it did, would never have been convinced by evidence less irresistible or dramatic. The injury done to the innocent was little, but the risk of injury was prodigious, and we fear it begins to attend every interesting trial. The public will not wait beyond a certain number of hours, and if the decision is protracted, returns a verdict for itself which we may be sure, in spite of all precautions, influences the jury. We shall not, we trust, see gossip enthroned on the Bench, but we may see it, as it often is in America, all-powerful in the jury-box. The evil is a growing one, and if it is humanly possible, it ought to be stopped in time. The only radical cure would be to prohibit reports, as we pro- hibit comments on evidence, before the verdict has been reached; and we do not despair, should the public ever be thoroughly shocked, either through the murder of some one under trial by a street-mob, or by the suicide of some sensitive witness, of seeing even this course at last favoured by opinion. Intermediately, however, the Judges ought to exert themselves to reduce the length of sensa- tional trials, which are protracted as much by their short sittings as by counsel's delight in continued daily refreshers. There is no reason whatever, except human laziness, why Courts should sit only for six hours a day ; and they ought, on occasion, to sit twelve, as they did constantly when juries were locked up, and when there were no evening papers hungry for "latest details." A trial which is complete in one day, or in two, leaves no time for the public mind to be poisoned by snippety reports ; and though we may not be able at once to reach that reasonable rapidity, we can at least make it an ideal. If, at the same time, the Judges will set their faces sternly against the " summaries " with which some journals now preface their reports, and which are almost necessarily full of bias, they would do something to mitigate an evil which is rapidly degrading, and, as we believe, will in no long time seriously injure, the administration of English justice.
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