Page:Address of Frederick V. Holman at Oregon Bar Association annual meeting.djvu/48

 action to the Supreme Court, merely on errors of the lower Court, will amount to nothing if there has been a verdict of a jury, for "no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of this State," excepting only when a case is appealed to the Supreme Court, and the whole testimony, etc., is attached to the bill of exceptions. Any matter which can now be shown after the trial, as, for instance, improper conduct by the jury, or that prejudice or passion influenced its verdict, and not appearing by the record of the trial, it would seem, cannot be considered by the lower Court or by the Supreme Court. Certainly if the Supreme Court did take cognizance of such new matters, it could not well determine what the judgment should be. But this amendment gives the Supreme Court the power to dispense a kind of crude. Oriental justice, which may cover deficiencies in this amendment.

While Section 3 gives the right by law to change the powers conferred by it on the Supreme Court in regard to determining what judgments shall be entered in civil and criminal cases, there is no right, by any law, to change the first sentence of Section 3. A change in the latter can be made by Constitutional amendment only. If the power is taken from the Supreme Court to set aside a verdict and to render a judgment, then a verdict once given cannot be re-examined by any Court; however unjust or unfair, it must stand. For centuries the jury has been a check on the tyranny and corruption of judges, while, at the same time, upright judges have corrected the verdicts of ignorant, prejudiced, and venal juries. To do away with this balance of power is to set aside the best safeguards for justice which the wit of man, guided by the experience of centuries, has been able to devise.

At first sight, the first sentence of this Section 3 would make it appear that this Section 3 applied to civil cases only. But that is not the fact. The rest of the section applies to criminal cases also. The punctuation is bad. The word "provided," which is preceded by a period, should be preceded by a colon. What follows after the word "provided" is a part of the sentence. There is no limitation on the "appeal of any