THE EFFETE JURY SYSTEM. Why Not Improve It?

Free Lance, Volume IV, Issue 190, 20 February 1904, Page 6

THE EFFETE JURY SYSTEM. Why Not Improve It?

CHIEF Justice Sir Robert Stout isn't satisfied with the jury law that insists upon, the unanimous opinion of "twelve good men and true" m criminal cases. We don't know anyone who is satisfied with it — not even the jurymen. A single stubborn person, who won't give way to the majority, is able to keep eleven men, who ought to be at work earning money the country refuses to make good, stewing in a locked room. * • • Vve've got to have the jury system, mainly because we've had it for hundreds of years, so we might as well use reason in its application. We accept a majority verdict of the people on almost any subject under the sun, but we allow one man in a dozen to make the opinion of eleven men of no effect If the stubborn man holds out, another jury is empanelled, and the car of Justice rolls on its way Come to think of it, the jury fetish, from any view-point, is a trifle farcical, and not a little barbaric. * * * The challenge system gives the challenger the advantage of being able to weed out all the intelligent men m a panel. In a small community, where everyone of his peculiar cast of mind is known, the challenge system isn't exactly the "clean potato." Be sure that men known to have a bias towards the prisoner will be retained, and those who might reasonably be suspected of impartiality carefully weeded out. The jury system has also brought into piominence the ghoulish persons who follow a corpse, and hang round a police office in search of a job on a coroner's jury * * * liie most that these unpleasant folk can say is that the corpse is dead. The police know it, the coroner knows it, and still the country's faith is pinned to the ; "^v and its unanimous verdict. Jurymen aie almost invariably unwilling workers, and the police have an extraordinary tendency to keep specific persons on their lists for session after session. Jurymen are not paid consistently with the work they try to do, and the work they try to do is most frequently destroyed by the stubbornness of a minority Let the system be mended, or it will have to be ended. The Norddeutscber Lloyd, the great Bremen shipping company, for which Messrs. Castendyk and Focke, Wellington merchants are agents, send along a striking wall calendar. The background depicts the sea, with three of the great four-funnelled leviathans of the company riding thereon. The calendar is detachable one date at a time, and each contains a motto.