United States or Samoa ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They were polite to him, of course, but they did manage to ask him some very unpleasant and rather personal questions, and they did manage to impress upon him that certain things mentioned in the Civic League's report must not be allowed to reoccur. One juror he was a planter had even had the temerity to say out loud the ugly word "penetentiary." Inglesby was shocked. He hadn't known.
The lawyer has seen that kind before and the one juror who seemed the most interested in the last case he argued was the very one who held out against him in the jury-room as he found afterwards. It seems a difficult matter to stir the jury and the men in the box are not at all a warm or enthusiastic audience.
They were in the Downs kitchen, and quite by themselves. Peter Downs himself had been drawn as a juror, and had been for two days at the county town. Mrs. Downs was giving herself to social interests in his absence, and Mrs. Forder, an asthmatic but very companionable person, had arrived by two o'clock that afternoon with her knitting work, sure of being welcome.
But it was time for the inquisitive juror to make himself heard again. Edging to the brink of the chair, he drew in his breath, with a vague awe of Mary's beauty, almost ludicrous to see, and asked if she had properly considered what she had just said. "I hope, sir, I consider all I am called upon to say at such a time as this," was her earnest reply.
I don't hear a word you say." The man was discharged. "He wouldn't have made a bad juror, though," whispered Braham. "I saw him looking at the prisoner sympathizingly. That's a point you want to watch for." The result of the whole day's work was the selection of only two jurors. These however were satisfactory to Mr. Braham. He had kept off all those he did not know.
Feeling, probably, considerable doubts upon the issue of any trial, moving upon whatsoever principle because in any case the composition of the jury must depend a good deal upon chance, and one recusant juror, or one juror falling ill at a critical moment, might have reduced the whole process to a nihility Sir Robert, like any moderate man, hoped that his warnings might meet with attention.
I have seldom been more infected by enthusiasm than I once was in Dulwich at a meeting of English cooperators where I was fairly overwhelmed by the fervor underlying the businesslike proceedings of the congress, and certainly when I served as a juror in the Paris Exposition of 1900, nothing in the entire display in the department of Social Economy was so imposing as the building housing the exhibit, which had been erected by cooperative trades-unions without the assistance of a single contractor.
"It would be an injury to the administration of justice," says C. J. Tilghman, "not to declare that it is gross misbehavior for any person to speak with a juror, or for a juror to permit any person to speak with him, respecting the cause he is trying, at any time after he is summoned and before the verdict is delivered."
Their idea, which was embodied in the common law, was that a man should be tried by a jury of his peers. But the way things have worked out, the man of average intelligence is apt to have to face a dozen jurors who are chosen partly for their lack of intelligence, and partly because their earning ability is so low that they are willing to serve for the paltry wage of a juror, whatever it may be.
Accordingly the juror, bearing his staff, enters the court which has the same colour as his staff, and the same letter as his counter. As he enters, he receives a voucher from the official to whom this duty has been assigned by lot. So with their counters and their staves the selected jurors take their seats in the court, having thus completed the process of admission.
Word Of The Day