The Supreme Court is now the highest court in this State having original jurisdiction—that is, having the power to hear the evidence in and determine actions commenced therein or removed thereto from an inferior court, as distinguished from the right to review on appeal. It may take cognizance of all manner of civil and criminal actions and proceedings triable in a State Court, except the impeachment of public officials, of which a quasi-criminal court—the Court for the Trial of Impeachments—alone has jurisdiction. In New York County, one part of the Supreme Court is usually devoted to the trial of criminal actions, and that part ordinarily sits each month in the year, except July, August and September. Cases that, because of the nature or circumstances of the crime charged or the prominence of the persons involved, are of particular public interest or importance are usually tried in the Supreme Court. There are material advantages to the accused in being tried in this court. The proceedings are apt to be more deliberate. The justices are experts in Civil Law, and have the advantage of the training which results from contact with the best legal minds and the consideration of the many difficult and important questions that arise in civil practice. The range of the criminal law as compared with the civil, is very narrow. The experience of the practitioner at the criminal bar tends to develop forensic rather than reasoning faculties; to narrow the mind and sharpen the wits, rather than broaden and deepen the intellect; to make alert, cunning, effective cross-examiners and wielders of technicalities, rather than strong logicians, quick in the discernment of fundamental principles, and ready in their application to the case in hand. Constant contact with the criminal classes, either as an advocate or in the exercise of judicial functions, has a tendency to deaden the sympathies, to lead to a complaisant view of the criminal as something inevitable, and to an indifference to the suffering that flows from his punishment. It results in an intuition and a preception of criminality in acts and persons where it frequently does not exist—in an unconscious predisposition to discover something sinister and evil in what may be innocent or merely injudicious. It is not a slur on the gentlemen who, with marked ability, untiring industry and sincere conscientiousness dispense justice in other criminal courts to say that the Supreme Court justices who hold criminal terms of that court are their superiors in the qualities that make a good judge, because of their wider experience and consequently better judicial qualification, and because of their freedom from bias against the accused, except such as may be temperamental.