626
THE GREEN BAG
and becomes little more than the moderator of a New England town meeting. But this is not all. The verdict, instead of being the end, is little more than the beginning of the serious litigation. There is the inevitable motion for a new trial; motions in arrest of judgment; bills of excep tion, taking months to settle; appeals to one and sometimes two appellate courts, where the judgment is often reversed for error which the law pronounces material, but which could not possibly have affected the verdict. The motion in arrest is a favorite device of the criminal lawyer, who, after spending a month in a trial, where every resource has been exhausted, sud denly discovers after a verdict of guilty, that he was not informed by the indictment what his client was being tried for, though he may never have demurred or objected to the testimony at the trial. Good sense would seem to require that motions of this kind should be made at the earliest moment, and should not be allowed for insufficient pleading, where the facts have been fully developed and submitted to the jury. Such I understand to be the law in some of the states. That by reason of these delays jury trials have become so intolerably prolonged, that, except in actions for torts, they have in some jurisdictions fallen largely into dis use. Indeed, so expectant is the public of these delays that when, in an important
criminal case, the accused is tried, convicted, and sentenced within a single day, be the trial never so fair, the papers speak offen sively of his having been "railroaded" to the penitentiary. The result is that the venerable system of trial by jury, which we inherited from England, has been so com pletely transformed as to be hardly recog nizable, and to have become so unpopular in some jurisdictions as to have largely given place to trials by the Court. Indeed. the great legal business of this country for the past fifty years, has been carried on quietly and upon the whole satisfactorily, in courts of equity. Unfortunately, the chief difficulties of which I have spoken are such as cannot be remedied by legislation. The multipli cation of judges, already enormously out of proportion to the population, promises no relief, since the delay inheres in their system of doing business. How far these delays, and the uncertainties of securing verdicts which shall stand, are responsible for the savage practice of lynching with its attendant horrors of hanging, shooting, burning, and torture, it is impossible to say, but it is significant at least, that in the adjoining Dominion 'to the north of us — a country where justice is adminis tered nominally at least on the same prin ciple as here, that system is entirely tinknown. WASHINGTON, D.C., August, 1(305.
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