Page:North Dakota Law Review Vol. 1 No. 7 (1924).pdf/4

4 motion for judgment but grants or denies the motion for a new trial, the moving party may appeal from the order as a whole and have the ruling on the motion for judgment notwithstanding the verdict reviewed in the supreme court.

The difficulty experienced by prosecution and defense attorneys in securing a jury to try William Shepherd focuses attention again upon certain weaknesses in the jury system of trial. So far, the Chicago trial has been absurd. It has brought out all the evils that possibly can be brought out in a criminal trial. It has shown how justice can be impeded when attorneys, without any check on them, resort to subterfuges and bickerings, and take advantage of every little technicality and legal “protection” that occurs.

This is not an argument against the jury system. Not at all. So far, it is the only workable system known, and, therefore, should be respected and used for the high purpose for which it was intended: the protection of the individual, the determination of guilt or innocence and the serving of justice. But, as the New York Times pointed out the other day, “many peculiarities of the system still are those imposed on it at a time when it was of enormous importance to protect common people from the oppression and the tyranny of the great.” The Times declares that protection of the innocent often is distorted “into protection for the guilty” by the way in which attorneys make use of the jury system.

In the Shepherd case, counsel for both sides are endeavoring to secure men or women without any preconceived notion as to the guilt or innocence of the defendant. They seek people who are not familiar with the case, and that, of course, is a difficult task, for the Shepherd affair has been aired in every paper in the land for many weeks. What if the talesmen have read of it? What if they have formed some idea? Does that disqualify them? Does it preclude sane thinking and a balanced weighing of the evidence on their part? Not at all.

It is not a difficult thing for a man capable of common sense to dismiss any notion or opinions he may have of a case and to consider the evidence alone. Being unbiased in a jury box, no matter what the previous opinion, is not so difficult and not so impossible as it may sound to attorneys.

As a matter of fact, a jury should be selected for its intelligence, its ability to reason and weigh one bit of evidence against another, rather than for a lack of intelligence or disinterestedness in matters of public import. But it is the latter that attorneys frequently demand. It is the kind of a jury the attorneys are trying to find in Chicago, and if they keep at it long enough, they’ll find it. But in the meantime they are making a farce of justice.