It is, of course, not unnatural that in the course of a trial occupying weeks or months the tension should occasionally be relieved by a gleam of humor. After you have been busy trying a case for a couple of weeks you go to court and set to work in much the same frame of mind in which you would attack any other business. But the fact that a small boy sometimes sees something funny at a funeral, or a bevy of giggling shop-girls may be sitting in the gallery at a fashionable wedding, argues little in respect to the solemnity or beauty of the service itself. What _are_ the celebrated cases—the trials that attract the attention and interest of the public? In the first place, they are the very cases which contain those elements most likely to arouse the sympathy and prejudices of a jury—where a girl has taken the life of her supposed seducer, or a husband has avenged his wife’s alleged dishonor. Such cases arouse the public imagination for the very reason that every man realizes that there _are_ two sides to every genuine tragedy of this character—the legal and the natural. Thus, aside from any other consideration, they are the obvious instances where justice is most likely to go astray. In the next place, the defence is usually in the hands of counsel of adroitness and ability; for even if the prisoner has no money to pay his lawyer, the latter is willing to take the case for the advertising he will get out of it. Third, a trial which lasts for a long time naturally results in creating in the jury’s mind an exaggerated idea of the prisoner’s rights, namely, the presumption of innocence and the benefit of the reasonable doubt. For every time that the jury will hear these phrases once in a petty larceny or forgery case, they will hear them in a big murder trial a hundred times. They see the defendant day after day, and the relation becomes more personal. Their responsibility seems greater toward him than toward the defendant in petty cases. Last, as previously suggested, murder cases are apt to be inherently weaker than others, and more often depend upon circumstantial evidence. The results of such cases are therefore but a poor test of the efficiency of a jury system. They are, in fact, the precise cases where, if at all, the jury might be expected to go wrong. But juries would go astray far less frequently even in such trials were it not for that most vicious factor in the administration of criminal justice—the “yellow” journal. For the impression that public trials are the scenes of coarse buffoonery and brutality is due to the manner in which these trials are exploited by the sensational papers.