The Daily News. THURSDAY, JANUARY 19. WOMEN JURIES.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 227, 19 January 1911, Page 4

The Daily News. THURSDAY, JANUARY 19. WOMEN JURIES.

A cabled item indicating that a jury of women heard a case against a woman who was charged with tampering with a gas-meter is evidently thought worthy of dissemination as marking a precedent. Although in New Zealand the politician lias got into the habit of addressing lady electors as appealing!}' as he addresses mere men voters, no New Zealand judge has yet been called upon to address the "ladies of the jury." The average man will aver that women have not the judicial faculty, and he might also hold that the average woman is guided more by her heart than her head. A juryman might search for his conclusion, but it is possible a jurywoman would jump to it. She might indeed make up her mind before all the evidence had been lieard. There have been many fine arguments adduced in favor of women juries for special cases, especially those in which defendants were women, but it has never yet been disproved that women are biassed in favor of their sex, and most women facing a trial would rather see whiskers than bonnets in the jury boxes. An ingenious writer once suggested the judicious admixture of both whiskers and bonnets on the same panel, but the natural chivalry of man—indeed, just the common every-day sex relationshipwould make such combined' work disastrous to justice. At least the opinion is stated for what it is worth. In the matter of the gas-meter, it occurs to us that it did not concern the American nation much whether the jury was a man jury or a ■woman jury, but up to now the American nation has shown no disposition to call a womaji jury to hear charges against millionaire cotton criminals or wealthy railway rogues and oil monarchs. Frankly, we believe that if the privilege of sitting on juries were handed out to New Zealand women, they would regard it without enthusiasm, and there is a possibility that there would be difficulty in completing panels, unless the genius of count officials decided that none but spinsters should be named on the lists. It is rather pathetic that the American cable man did not wait until a woman jury was called upon to adjudicate on a case involving something more serious

than the vagaries of a gas-meter, but if America does succeed in empanelling a lady jury in a "cause celebre" we hope the cable man will not be dumb. By far the most practical suggestion in relation to employment of women jurise was advanced by a French writer a month or two ago. His idea was that a case should be heard by two juries, one of women, the other of men. "If their separate decisions coincided on comparison," he wrote, "it would settle the vexed question as to whether women were capable of coming to as just a decision as a man. If it were proved that she could be equally unbiassed, then the road might be made clear from the Bar to the Bench for every Portia capable of treading it"