Thus ended the great trial, “The United States of America vs. Susan B. Anthony.”  From this date the question of woman suffrage was lifted from one of grievances into one of Constitutional Law.

This was Judge Hunt’s first criminal case after his elevation to the Supreme Bench of the United States.  He was appointed at the solicitation of his intimate friend and townsman, Roscoe Conkling, and had an interview with him immediately preceding this trial.  Mr. Conkling was an avowed enemy of woman suffrage.  Miss Anthony always has believed that he inspired the course of Judge Hunt and that his decision was written before the trial, a belief shared by most of those associated in the case.

Miss Anthony says in her journal:  “The greatest judicial outrage history ever recorded!  No law, logic or demand of justice could change Judge Hunt’s will.  We were convicted before we had a hearing and the trial was a mere farce.”  Some time afterwards Judge Selden wrote her:  “I regard the ruling of the judge, and also his refusal to submit the case to the jury, as utterly indefensible.”  Scarcely a newspaper in the country sustained Judge Hunt’s action.  The Canandaigua Times thus expressed the general sentiment in an editorial, soon after the trial: 

The decisions of Judge Hunt in the Anthony case have been widely criticised, and it seems to us not without reason.  Even among those who accept the conclusion that women have not a legal right to vote and who do not hesitate to express the opinion that Miss Anthony deserved a greater punishment than she received, we find many seriously questioning the propriety of a proceeding whereby the proper functions of the jury are dispensed with, and the Court arrogates to itself the right to determine as to the guilt or innocence of the accused party.  If this may be done in one instance, why may it not in all?  And if our courts may thus arbitrarily direct what verdicts shall be rendered, what becomes of the right to trial “by an impartial jury,” which the Constitution guarantees to all persons alike, whether male or female?  These are questions of grave importance, to which the American people now have their attention forcibly directed through the extraordinary action of a judge of the Supreme Court.  It is for them to say whether the right of trial by jury shall exist only in form, or be perpetuated according to the letter and spirit of the Constitution.

The New York Sun scored the judge as follows: 

Judge Hunt allowed the jury to be impanelled and sworn, and to hear the evidence; but when the case had reached the point of the rendering of the verdict, he directed a verdict of guilty.  He thus denied a trial by jury to an accused party in his court; and either through malice, which we do not believe, or through ignorance, which in such a flagrant degree is equally culpable in a judge, he violated one of the most important provisions