THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



JANUARY, 1885. 



A GLANCE AT THE JUEY SYSTEM. 



By C, H. STEPHENS. 



" Our little systems have their day ; 

 They have their day, aud cease to be." 



THERE is no one, I fancy, who is in the habit of reading the news- 

 papers, or of witnessing the conduct of jury-trials, but has often 

 had occasion to laugh at the vagaries of juries and their curious ver- 

 dicts. A volume might be filled with them which would rival in in- 

 terest Dean Ramsay's " Reminiscences " or Joe Miller's " jokes." '' It 

 seems a daring and presumptuous thing," says a learned writer, " to 

 attack as useless an institution on which writers, both lay and legal, 

 have bestowed so much eulogy." And not only does it seem daring 

 and presumptuous, but one can hardly in imagination conceive a time 

 when the jury, with all its record of past services, all its glorious bat- 

 tles for liberty, and all its memories of great pleaders, shall have passed 

 away ; when the jury-box, with its "twelve men all arow," shall have 

 disappeared ; and when the challenge to the array, and the challenge 

 to the poll, the pathetic addresses of counsel, and the judge's charge,, 

 shall be heard of no more forever. Nevertheless, when we see, every 

 month or two, fifty, sixty, or seventy men drafted from the industrial 

 classes to supply what is called a ' petty jury," and a cou^^le of dozen 

 more from, perhaps, a somewhat higher class, to form what is called a 

 " grand jury " ; when we see the farmer leave his plow, the builder 

 his building, and the shopkeeper his counter, and come together from 

 places many miles apart ; when we see them day after day idling aboTit 

 the courts and taverns ; when we see them in the jury-box listening 

 lazily to the proceedings before them ; when we hear them delivering 



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