To return to the legal side of the matter, which has numerous less notorious parallels, Crippen had been found guilty of the wilful murder of his wife in the coroner’s court, though he had not yet been tried by any jury qualified by law to convict him of the crime. To point out a further anomaly, _i.e._, the fiction that an accused person is assumed to be innocent until proved guilty, it may be argued that up to the time of his trial at the Central Criminal Court, Crippen was technically an innocent man, though he had already been found guilty of wilful murder by an unauthorised body of jurors! Such a hopelessly inconsistent state of affairs is grotesque in this country which is held up as a pattern of justice and legal perfection generally. Of course, in the Crippen case there was no sort of doubt whatever as to the accused’s guilt; the case is here quoted because it may be fresher in the public mind than many other cases, which portray similarly anomalous features. At some trials, jurors are subjected to downright inconvenience with a view to preventing their contact with prejudicial persons or prints. In the Crippen case, the members of the Old Bailey jury may reasonably have been expected to see newspaper reports dealing with the verdict of the coroner’s jury. If they did so read the information contained in these reports, they knew that Crippen had already been _found guilty_ of the wilful murder of his wife, Cora Crippen, a crime for which they were about to try him. Truly enough, Crippen was convicted of murder at the Old Bailey, on evidence of a remarkably satisfactory character, taking into consideration the complexity of the original clues. But though this is in fact the case, there is no gainsaying the grossness of the system which permits a man to be publicly found guilty of a terrible offence for which he has not yet even been tried. The coroner’s jury’s verdict of “wilful murder” should be relegated to ancient history in these practical times when precision and definity rule all things. A coroner’s office gains no lustre by submitting its holder to the satirical function of hearing verdicts which are not verdicts in law or practice, but which, nevertheless, are liable to confuse the ignorant mind and to do harm where good is intended. It should be remembered that jurors are not as a rule drawn from a class of original thinkers, persons, that is to say, who are intellectually trained to discriminate--to judge for themselves. Even if they were, the existing custom of allowing a murder verdict to be returned before a case goes for trial is both prejudicial and improper. FOOTNOTES [28] See Appendix D. [29] Some such scheme appears to have been adopted since this chapter was written. [30] “No fewer than four persons were charged at Marylebone police-court this afternoon with attempted suicide. “The first was a domestic servant, who was found lying in the road, having taken poison.