Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 15.pdf/336

 Rditorial Department. IT is difficult to imagine anything more annoying than the constant coughing of some person in a court room during an ar gument. Sometimes a point is lost and often a witness becomes confused and embarrassed by the interruption. Once Lord Brampton, better known as Sir Henry Hawkins, inter rupted a case at the High Court of Justice in London in order to reprove a troublesome cougher at the back of the court. "There is a gentleman at the back,'' said the judge, in his grave, measured way, "who has a very bad cough, and who has constituted himself a kind of chorus to the evidence. I hope that that person will go home and go to bed!" For a few seconds there was an expec tant pause, an awful silence in which you could have heard a pin drop. Nobody moved, however, and what is more to the point, for the rest of the day nobody coughed. Coughing seems to be contagious, for if one person in a court room begins to cougli there is a tickling sensation in many a throat which can only be relieved by coughing. The writer was in an Irish Court during a very sensational trial. A large crowd had gathered and silence reigned for an hour or more, when it was broken by someone coughing, a second joined in, then a third, and it seemed as though coughing would be general. Baron Dowse, the presiding judge, interrupted the proceedings and said: "The court will adjourn for ten minutes so that all can relieve themselves of their cough." There was no need for an adjournment for the coughing ceased and was not renewed, although the court sat for five hours longer.

IN the Kansas District Court, recently, a jury returned a verdict finding a certain ac cused person guilty of larceny. The verdict had not been prepared in the technical form 'desired, and the judge sent" the jury back to make the necessary corrections. The jury was gone for half an hour, and when it re turned it brought in a verdict acquitting the prisoner! But a verdict even more amusing was perpetrated by a jury at Pittsburg the other dav. The case was a criminal one, and

297

after a few minutes' consultation the jury filed into the box from its room. "Have you agreed upon a verdict?" asked the judge. "We have," responded the foreman, pass ing it over. "The clerk will read," said the judge. And the clerk read:— ''We, your jury, agree to disagree!"—Ex change. THE case of Ryan r. Ryan, which was an action for probate of a will and was tried by Mr. Justice Barton last week, disclosed an extraordinary amount of ingenuity on the part of the solicitor who had received in structions from the deceased and had pre pared the will. The deceased, a man named Ryan, had been struck down by paralysis and deprived of nearly all power over his mus cles. He was unable to speak or to move his hands or arms, but, as it was proved, his brain was unaffected, and his intellect was clear. He still had power to open and shut his eyes, and the solicitor arranged that the closing of his eyes was to mean an affirma tive answer to -a question, and the keeping them open a negative answer. By means then of an elaborate and exhaustive series of questions, which the testator answered in that manner, the solicitor extracted his wishes and prepared the will, and the testator assented to its contents in the same way. The will was contested by a legatee under a former will. Mr. Justice Barton held that the will was properly executed and decreed pro bate. He considered, however, that the mat ter was one in which investigation was rea sonable, and he gave the opposing party his costs out of the estate.—The Law Times. AMONG other "Surviving Absurdities and Curiosities of the Law," J. M. Lely, in The Law Magazine and Review, cites the follow ing example: Corn Rents.—By an Elizabethan statute, 18 Eliz., c. 6 (omitted from the Revised Statutes as "Private," but especially saved so recently as 1800, by sect. 7 of the Ecclesiasti cal Leases Act of that year, 39 & 40 Geo.