At the trial, everything the law forbids the police to do, is permitted to the District Attorney. In his opening and closing addresses, he exaggerates shamelessly, and tries to prejudice the jurymen with poison distilled from his own imagination. For three months he will be allowed to pour expert testimony into the jury box. And by the way, if a man is guilty, does it take a matter of a quarter of a million and a quarter of a year to show it? At this trial proper—or rather improper—the caricaturist with drawing-board, the jackal reporters—all the cannibals of Park Row, join in the man hunt. Nothing is sacred. Old age, grief, womanhood, innocence are but so much material for the “story.” The official stenographer’s report is a prosaic thing—away with it. The defendant’s appearance, his conduct—will be indeed a problem for the readers of the penny dreadfuls—for while the “Journal” describes his eyes gleaming in their sockets like an infuriated bull’s, the “World” chronicles the tears which course down his pitiable countenance, and the “Herald” comments on his indifferent and callous demeanor.
But if the State has not proved me guilty? the prisoner may ask. A fallacy, my friend; in these days you must prove your innocence. Of course the accused is convicted. No man, however innocent, can successfully combat the fourth degree. Everything has worked like a charm; but at last, after two years, perhaps, or more, the case reaches the Court of Appeals. Then the master stroke is given, the _finesse_ of which is startling even to old criminal lawyers. That the conviction has been obtained illegally is universally admitted. How will the attorney for the people induce the Court of Appeals to sustain it? Of course, the method will be in the nature of an innovation; for the fourth degree is a new thing, and just as certainly will it be something unjust.
Judging others by himself, the Able Assistant will rely on the use of money. Special counsel is obtained to try to have the illegal conviction sustained in the higher courts. A man of national reputation, the leader of his party, and noted for his political influence and his willingness to use it; who, strangely enough, when high in office appointed some of the judges who are to listen to his argument, may be retained to argue before the Court of Appeals, and beg that it allow the conviction to stand. The honorable special counsel receives a great many thousands of dollars for doing this, and in one case had at last the opportunity of gratifying a little personal grudge of nearly twenty years’ standing. As the epitaph of the Western man read, “He did his damnedest; angels could do no more.”