A Jury Story.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume I, Issue 17, 4 November 1879, Page 4

A Jury Story.

One of the best jury stories I have heard for a long time (says a London correspondent) was told about a case which was tried at Westminster recently. The action was brought to decide a dispute between a water company and some of its consumers, and the evidence in favor of defendants seemed so irresistible that the judge expressed his wonder that the jury should want to retire to consider their verdict. After being absent some time they came back and announced that they were all agreed with the exception of one, and the judge, indignant at a single person refusing to accept the overwhelming testimony offered in favor of the defendants, made some remarks not flattering to the intellectual powers of the solitary recalcitrant, though, of course, no one out of the jurybox knew which of the twelve was the man. However, the jury had to be discharged, and it afterwards it turned out that it was the twelfth who had taken the same view of the evidence as the judge himself, and the other eleven who had refused to adopt what his lordship, and, indeed, everybody else in Court, thought the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from the fact.