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The Green Bag
trustworthiness and loved them into lovable dispositions and noble careers. 'Virtue went out of Him' was written of our Lord, and truly we may say it of this His faithful ser vant. "But one may say: Are these the virtues of a learned judge? Have we not rather thought of justice as blind, impersonal, coldly wise and inhumanly exact? If we have, then this noble life may correct our error and teach us to think more nobly of the sphere and function of human law. When Judge Gaskill mounted the bench he had the repu tation of being a stern and inflexible judge. He blamed the evil-doer, and he righteously executed righteous laws. But he did this not as a mere recorder of sentences, but as a
human being dealing with his fellow men. Perhaps no man of our time on the bench more finely combined the judicial and the human than did Judge Gaskill." "On the bench," says the Boston Transscript, "his decisions reflected high courage. In the matter of injunctions he was prompt and accurate in his grasp of the principles of a case. Few of his decisions under this head or any other were ever set aside, their sound ness being attested whenever referred to a higher tribunal." With this opinion the Boston Advertiser agrees, observing: "His deci sions were rarely set aside, and thus through out his career has been bred and made firm a public faith in him and his works in the law."
Judge Putnam's Views on the Reelfoot Lake Case THE principal cause of disaster to trains is the habit of getting behind time, and the principal cause of disaster in the courts is the same." These words are taken from a communica tion sent to the Portland (Me.) Press by Judge William L. Putnam of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, in which he expresses some views regarding legal proce dure suggested by the recent miscarriage of justice in Lake County, Tenn., where the trial judge whose proceedings were afterward re versed pushed matters to an extreme in order to secure the conviction of eight persons accused of the murders at Reelfoot Lake. This case, he writes, illustrates the ills of small counties. It is there impossible to obtain prosecuting attorneys of proper skill and experience. But the main difficulty here arose from the fact that the accused were entitled under the statute to 192 challenges, over one quarter the total number of persons qualified to serve as jurors in the county. The situation was also complic.ted by the fact that the whole county wa;' inflamed against a corporation, on accouik of its summary disposal of fishery rights wl'ich had been enjoyed by individuals for moiV than one hundred years, and the question iA the
sympathy of jurors with the murderers came up. It was not at all strange, therefore, that the trial judge pushed his proceedings to an extreme :— "Under the circumstances it is not at all strange that the Supreme Court of Tennessee said of the trial judge that 'he assumed control from the start' of the matter of selecting the grand jury. Of course under the circum stances I have described it would be almost impossible to obtain an indictment from any grand jury. Consequently he secured thir teen jurors by selecting them from the by standers. It may well be presumed that he made this selection arbitrarily in view of in some way securing an indictment. To any one that follows thoroughly, it is also plain he went to the extreme of the law, and had to, in order to secure a verdict from a hostile county. . . . The wonder is not that the verdict was reversed but that the trial court was able to get any verdict at all." Hence it is not the courts of Lake county that are to be condemned, says Judge Put nam, but rather the constitution of these small counties by the legislature. Moreover,— "The great cause of what are called failures of justice is in the legislature. A striking illustration of that fact is found in the Con gressional habeas corpus act in 1872, which was so loosely drawn that there was no pos sible way of preventing any person postponing execution of criminal judgment by appealing
