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The special jury consisted of the following: Alfred Upward, Augustus Voelcker, Captain Alfred Henry Waldy, Thomas Richard Walker, Robert Wallace, Edmund Waller, Arthur Walter, Charles Alfred Walter, John Ward, Arthur Warre; the two talesmen, who were afterwards added to make up the number, were George Skinner and Charles Wilson.
None of them ever had in all his years of jury service. Time and again he had been the one stubborn man to hang out all night for a verdict of guilty against eleven outraged and indignant fellow talesmen who wanted to acquit. But quite unconsciously he found himself saying that this old fellow at the bar wasn't a rogue at all. If he was a criminal he was so at most only in a Pickwickian sense.
After a rather long experience as a prosecutor, in which he conducted many hundreds of criminal cases, the writer believes that the ordinary New York City jury finds a correct general verdict four times out of five. As to talesmen in other localities he has no knowledge or reliable information.
Four out of every five men examined professed a disbelief in capital punishment, which, although it merely covered a fear of the Mafia's antagonism, nevertheless excused them for cause. Day after day this mockery went on. As the list of talesmen grew into the hundreds and the same extraordinary antipathy to hanging continued to manifest itself, it occasioned remark, then ridicule.
It was to be a long and hard-fought case, there would be a good deal of prestige attached to it, and also there were numerous sums of money floating round. Anybody who got in, and who voted right, might be sure of an income for life, to say nothing of a life-job as a juror if he wanted it. Peter happened to be in court while the talesmen were being questioned.
As things stand to-day, a thief caught in the very act of picking a pocket in the night-time may challenge arbitrarily the twenty most intelligent talesmen called to sit as jurors in his case. Does such a practice make for justice?
A special panel of two hundred talesmen filled the first half dozen rows of benches, the others being occupied by witnesses both Chinese and white, policemen and the miscellaneous human flotsam and jetsam that always manages somehow or other to find its way to a murder trial.
She had been playing second lead at the theater and had had a New York offer. Frank could not understand why she refused it. But Norah did, though she kept the secret from Frank. "Do you know how many talesmen have been called in the Calhoun trial?" Aleta asked, looking up from the newspaper. "There were nearly 1500 in the Ruef case. They called that a record." She laughed.
Those selected as grand jurors were chosen because of their superior intelligence, wealth, and purity of character. These selections were made at certain stated periods; and the jurors thus chosen from the mass never served on the petit jury, nor were they liable even as talesmen to serve on that jury.
The filling of this jury box from a long list of talesmen was the preliminary move to a trial in which the defendant was barely mentioned, and which involved the question of Labor's right to organize, to assemble peaceably, to speak freely, and to advocate a change in existing social arrangements. Capital was lined up in a fight against Labor.
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