As to the conduct of such cases, the writer’s own experience is that a murder trial is the most solemn proceeding known to the law.  He has prosecuted at least fifty men for murder, and convicted more than he cares to remember.  Such trials are invariably dignified and deliberate so far as the conduct of the legal side of the case is concerned.  No judge, however unqualified for the bench; no prosecutor, however light-minded; no lawyer however callous, fails to feel the serious nature of the transaction or to be affected strongly by the fact that he is dealing with life, and death.  A prosecutor who openly laughed or sneered at a prisoner charged with murder would severely injure his cause.  The jury, naturally, are overwhelmed with the gravity of the occasion and the responsibility resting upon them.

In the Patterson, Thaw, and Molineux cases the evidence, unfortunately, dealt with unpleasant subjects and at times was revolting, but there was a quiet propriety in the way in which the witnesses were examined that rendered it as inoffensive as it could possibly be.  Outside the court-room the vulgar crowd may have spat and sworn; and inside no doubt there were degenerate men and women who eagerly strained their ears to catch every item of depravity.  But the throngs that filled the courtroom were quiet and well ordered, and the justified interested outnumbered the morbid.

The writer deprecates the impulse which leads judges, from a feeling that justice should be publicly administered, to throw wide the doors of every courtroom, irrespective of the subject-matter of the trial.  We need have no fear of Star Chamber proceedings in America, and no harm would be done by excluding from the courtroom all persons who have no business there.

It is, of course, not unnatural that in the course of a trial occupying weeks or months the tension should occasionally be relieved by a gleam of humor.  After one has been busy trying a case for a couple of weeks one goes to court and sets to work in much the same frame of mind in which one would attack any other business.  But the fact that a small boy sometimes sees something funny at a funeral, or a bevy of giggling shop-girls may be sitting in the gallery at a fashionable wedding, argues little in respect to the solemnity or beauty of the service itself.

What are the celebrated cases—­the trials that attract the attention and interest of the public?  In the first place, they are the very cases which contain those elements most likely to arouse the sympathy and prejudices of a jury—­where a girl has taken the life of her supposed seducer, or a husband has avenged his wife’s alleged dishonor.  Such cases arouse the public imagination for the very reason that every man realizes that there are two sides to every genuine tragedy of this character—­the legal and the natural.  Thus, aside from any other consideration, they are the obvious instances where justice is most likely to go astray.