Another feature of the preliminary stages of a French criminal trial is the manner in which the evidence which the examining magistrate collects is made public as he collects it. The examining magistrate receives members of the Press during the days, weeks, and often months of his preliminary examination of the evidence, and to all intents and purposes the evidence which has been laid before him is put at their disposal for publication. It is very rarely indeed that an examining magistrate in France withholds any of the evidence he collects from the newspapers, and as each item is usually laid before the public, commented on at length, and frequently distorted in accordance with the views of the staff of the newspaper which reproduces it, the public try a case while it is in process of trial, and the newspapers criticise the examining magistrate’s conduct of the long examination and deliver a verdict of their own before the jury have an opportunity of doing so. These methods form part of the legal code of France, and as such, open to criticism though they may be, are never criticised. The methods of preliminary trial of a French criminal case present of course this grave disadvantage, that every one of the twelve jurymen and the two supplementary jurymen before whom the case is tried, practically hear or read all the evidence before they see the witnesses and hear them in court, and practically have tried and have judged the case in their own minds, however impartial they may try to be, before they come into court to try and to judge it. I have already mentioned the freedom of action which the examining magistrate enjoys in France. This is unlimited. An examining magistrate is hampered by nothing at all in his examination of the prisoner, or of witnesses for and against, except by the dictates of his own conscience. As it is human nature for a man to shrink from the acknowledgment that he has been mistaken, it is obvious that a French examining magistrate who starts with the idea that his prisoner is a guilty man or woman will do everything in his power, and his power has no limit except his own conscience, to prove the guilt of his prisoner. He may, and often does, use dramatic methods to force a confession. He may, and often does, lie to the prisoner for the purpose of extracting a confession. He may, and often does, misreport to the prisoner evidence which has been given him so as to entrap a guilty prisoner, whom he can manage to convince that the game is up, into a full confession of guilt. There have been many cases known of abuse of this power. It has happened before now that a prisoner, accused of a crime of which he or she is perfectly innocent, has actually confessed to the crime rather than endure the mental torture of the examining magistrate’s persistent cross-examination.