Lord Coleridge. etiquette of refusing to discuss ab initio the personal connection of a participant in a crime with its circumstances : and of yielding fully to the Saxon presumption that an accused was innocent until duly proven guilty. But, when newspaper managers discovered that a popular desire to hear the fullest particulars about a crime promoted the circulation of their journals, this oldfashioned etiquette was discarded. Little by little the emulation of those managers begat a tale of narration, which inspired com ment with expression of opinions; and these in turn got impressed upon readers from among whom jurors must be chosen. Inasmuch as now-a-days a newspaper is as much a part of a breakfast menu as is a cup of coffee, tea, or chocolate, the break fasted reader who does not become impressed with newspaper narrations or comments upon criminal occurrences is as singular as the citizen who does not cast his vote at a presidential election. In some states legislation has sought to circumscribe the effect of newspaper trials upon citizens who are summoned to jury duty. Some statutes have annulled the ancient formulas of having triers or jurors early empanelled decide challenges to the impartiality or the bias, and have made the court sole tryer; but in effect making the challenged juror the practical tryer by submitting to him this arbitrary question : "Notwithstanding any impression or opinion you may have formed or expressed, can you so far banish the same as to enable you to award an impartial verdict upon legal evidence here to be given into your keeping?" If the juror answers affirmatively the judge, unless detecting. from mode of answer or behavior that the juror is insincere, is apt to decide that the juror is competent as to impartiality; and to either force the challenging counsel into a peremptory challenge within statutory limit or to placing the juror into his own seat of judgment. This method of deciding a challenge of
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course allows a juror who is desirous of deciding the fate of an accused to swear himself into the jury box from motives of either sympathy or prejudice; or who being anxious to escape jury duty makes oath to partiality so as to accomplish his object. The older common-law procedure of sub mitting the juror's appearance and mode of answer to laymen triers has seemed to lawyers skilled at jury challenging to be fairer than the later statutory procedure. The older submission was practically putting a simple question as follows — would you wish this candidate to be a fellow juryman, or would you accept him in your own case? Trial by newspaper anterior to the regular legal trial is however not so mischievous as that mode of such trial which impends con currently with the statutory trials. The greater public of readers who practically enter the court room already impressed through the medium of newspaper reports demand from newspaper conductors not only stenographic narrations of evidence but also the flavor of editorial comments thereon. The jurors who sit from day to day during a long trial which is daily reported in the local press are admonished by the Bench not to read the newspapers : but admoni tions cannot alter human nature. Impanelled jurors will nevertheless read the newspaper accounts of the very drama in which they are actors. A recent woman novelist has contended that men are habitually more curious than those of her own sex; and that modern Adams are more prone to taste forbidden fruit than the Eves of the present time. Granted then that jurors under duty will yield to temptation of press head-lines and insist upon reading newspaper reports of the evidence to which they have already listened and of comments and rhetorical diversions (possibly perversions) thereon: who shall say what impresses those reading jurors most — what they hear or what they read.
