Appeals in criminal causes are, however, much rarer and also much less often successful than is generally supposed. About eleven thousand persons were convicted of felonies in the County Courts of New York during the five years from 1898 to 1902, inclusive of each, and of these less than nine in a thousand pursued an appeal, not a third of whom secured a judgment of reversal.[Footnote: Nathan A. Smyth, _Harvard Law Review_ for March, 1904.] In Massachusetts, about a hundred thousand criminal prosecutions are annually brought, and the appeals to the Supreme Judicial Court from sentences of conviction rarely exceed twenty to twenty-five in number, and upon these in each of the years 1902 and 1903 only two new trials were granted.[Footnote: _Law Notes_ for December, 1904.] A comparison of the number of those put to death in the United States for crime by the courts, and on a charge of crime by a mob, for the past three years shows these results: Executed by Judicial Sentence. Lynched. Total. 1901 118 125 243 1902 144 96 240 1903 123 125 248 A large majority of those lynched were negroes, and met their fate in the South. It is extremely difficult to secure a conviction of those who take part in such acts of violence. They commit the crime of murder, and the penalty is so heavy that their fellow-citizens are unwilling to subject them to it. The offenses with which the men whom they kill are charged are also generally of a nature which make them peculiarly offensive to the community. Many are negroes charged with the rape of a white woman, to whom it would be intensely disagreeable to testify against them. Not a few are men under sentence of death, who it is feared may escape or delay punishment by an appeal. Such considerations cannot excuse, but present some slight palliation for those acts of mob violence by which the people of the United States are so often disgraced. It may be added that out of the Southern States they are quite rare, and in the Northeastern States substantially unknown. Of the one hundred and four lynchings in 1903, only twelve occurred in the North or West. * * * * * CHAPTER XVIII THE EXERCISE OF JUDICIAL FUNCTIONS OUT OF COURT