American State Trials, Vol. 10: A Collection of the Important and Interesting Criminal Trials Which Have Taken Place in the United States, From the ... With Notes and Annotations (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

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Excerpt from American State Trials, Vol. 10: A Collection of the Important and Interesting Criminal Trials Which Have Taken Place in the United States, From the Beginning of Our Government to the Present Day; With Notes and Annotations

Here Justice received its first wound. Every civ ilized nation has determined that the guilt or inno cence of one accused of crime and the punishment to be meted out to the criminal shall be decided by reg ular Courts of Justice presided over by trained jur ists, assisted in most of them by twelve laymen - called a jury. This is the best that civilization has been able so far to evolve. These tribunals may sometimes err whereby innocent men are sent to the gallows and guilty men are set free, for no human system is per feet. But the agitation in the Frank case was a pro test against this historical and well-ordered method. It was a clamor that questions of guilt or innocence should be decided not by the established tribunals but by popular vote. It was a demand that those tribu nals should solve the problem, not according to the opinions of its judges founded upon the evidence, but upon the views of the multitude, founded upon senti ment and rhetoric. It is perfectly clear that this is a denial and negation of all law and of all authority. It is simply Lynch Law, exaggerated and popularized. We cannot try issues of this kind in this way; we can not decide the guilt or innocence of an accused man or woman by a show of hands in a town meeting or by counting noses on the street. And the people of no state in the American Union are going to acquiesce in this kind of proceeding. No citizen of one state is willing to submit to the inhabitants of the other states the question whether the decisions of its own tribunals are right or wrong and should or should not be en forced. And this is what happened in Georgia.

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