It has been asserted on many sides that the unofficial
attempts to review the decision of the jury in the Maybrick case, point to a Court of Criminal Appeal as the only remedy for the amateur revision of criminal cases in the Press and by the petitions of Members of Parliament. We should be very glad to adopt this or any other remedy for so monstrous an evil as the undermining of the authority of Courts of Justice by airy and irresponsible correspondents of the various journals,—correspondents who have neither heard the evidence given, nor been compelled to weigh its total effect on the mind, and who very often have not even mastered fully the drift of the newspaper reports, but have fastened on one or two isolated points on which they thought they saw their way to an effective letter. But the only hope that a Court of Criminal Appeal would prevent this great mischief, would be the stern assertion by that Court of the right to treat amateur re-trials of criminal cases in the Press, as a contempt of Court. Would such an assertion of its privilege be likely ? We fear greatly that the interest of the Press is so closely identified with these sensational criticisms of verdicts in criminal cases, that the number of offenders would be too numerous and their persons too insignificant to render it possible to inflict on them effective penalties. And if the only result were the establishment of a new Court intent on studying nervously all the indications in the Press of the drift of public opinion, we might just as well leave that function, as it is left now, to a harassed Home Secretary acting in conjunction with the Judge who had heard the first trial, and who had watched the behaviour of all the witnesses.
