Our trial by
jury has its imperfections; but, laying aside its demonstrated value
and necessity in great struggles for freedom, before and since the
time of Erskine, no better scheme can be devised to do its great and
indispensable work. The very things which seem to an uninformed man
like rejection or confusion of truth are a part of the sifting by
which it is to be reached. The admission or rejection of evidence
under sound rules of law, the presenting of the whole case of each
party and of the best argument which can be made upon it by his
counsel, the charge of the judge and the verdict of the jury,--all
are necessary parts of the process of reaching truth and justice.
Counsel themselves cannot know a whole case until tried to its end;
their clients have a right to their best services, within the limits
of personal honor; and lawyers are derelict in duty, not only to
their clients, but to justice itself, if they do not present their
cases to the best of their ability, when they are to be followed by
opposing counsel, by the judge, and by the jury. The popular judgment
is not only capricious,--it not only assumes that legal precedents,
founded in justice for the protection of the honest, are petty
technicalities or tricks through which the dishonest escape,--it is
not only formed out of the court-room, with no opportunity to see
witnesses and hear testimony, often very different in reality from
what they seem in print,--but it visits upon counsel its ignorant
prejudices against the theory and practice of the law itself, and
forgets that lawyers cannot present to the jury a particle of
evidence except with the sanction of the court under sound rules of
law, and that the law is to be laid down by the court alone.
Pages:
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241