Criminals -- Fiction; Social problems -- Fiction; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918 -- Fiction
During the closing sentences of Eades’s speech Glassford had drawn some
papers from a drawer and arranged them on his desk. These papers
contained portions of charges he had made in other criminal cases.
Glassford motioned to the bailiff, who bore him a glass of iced water,
from which Glassford took a sip and set it before him, as if he would
need it and find it useful in making his charge. Then he took off his
gold eye-glasses, raised his eyebrows two or three times, drew out a
large handkerchief and began polishing his glasses as if that were the
most important business of his life. He breathed on the lenses, then
polished them, then breathed again, and polished again.
Glassford had selected those portions of the charges he kept in stock,
which assured the jury of the greatness of the English law, told how
they must consider a man innocent until he had been proved guilty beyond
a reasonable doubt, that they must not draw any conclusions unfavorable
to the prisoner at the bar from the fact that he had not taken the
witness-stand, and so on. These instructions were written in long,
involved sentences, composed as nearly as possible of words of Latin
derivation. Glassford read them slowly, but so as to give the
impression that it was an extemporaneous production.
The jurymen, though many of them did not know the meaning of the words
Glassford used, thought they all sounded ominous and portentous, and
seemed to suggest Archie’s guilt very strongly. For half an hour
Glassford read from his instructions, from the indictment and from the
statutes, then suddenly recalling the fact that the public was greatly
interested in this case, he began to talk of the heinousness of this
form of crime and the sacredness of human life. In imagination he could
already see the editorials that would be printed in the newspapers,
praising him for his stand, and this, he reflected, would be beneficial
to him in his campaign for renomination and reelection. Finally he told
the jurymen that they must not be affected by motives of sympathy or
compassion or pity for the prisoner at the bar or his family, for they
had nothing to do with the punishment that would be inflicted upon him.
Then he read the various verdicts to them, casually mentioning the
verdict of "not guilty" in the tone of an after-thought and as a
contingency not likely to occur, and then told them, at last, that they
could retire.
At five o’clock the jury stumbled out of the box and entered the little
room to the left.
XIX
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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