Yet how far does the element of sex defeat the ends of justice?  To answer this question it is necessary to determine how far juries are liable to favor the testimony of a woman plaintiff merely because she is a woman, and how far sympathy for a woman arraigned as a prisoner is likely to warp their judgment.

As to the first, it is fairly safe to say that a woman is much more likely to win a verdict in a civil court or to persuade the jury that the prisoner is guilty in a criminal case than a man would be in precisely similar circumstances.  In most criminal prosecutions for the ordinary run of felonies little injustice is likely to result from this.  There is one exception, however, where juries should reach conclusions with extreme caution, namely, where certain charges are brought by women against members of the opposite sex.

Here the jury is apt to leap to a conclusion, rendered easy by the attractiveness of the witness and the feeling that the defendant is a “cur anyway,” and ought to be “sent up.”

The difficulty of determining, even in one’s office, the true character of a plausible woman is enhanced tenfold in the court-room, where the lawyer is generally compelled to proceed upon the assumption that the witness is a person of irreproachable life and antecedents.  Almost any young woman may create a favorable impression, provided her taste in dress be not too crude, and, even when it is so, the jury are not apt to distinguish carefully between that which cries to Heaven and that which is merely “elegant.”

When the complaining witness is a woman who has merely lost money through the acts of the defendant, the jury are not so readily moved to accept her story in toto as when the crime charged is of a different character.  They realize that the complainant, feeling that she has been injured, may be inclined to color her testimony, perhaps unconsciously, until the wrong becomes a crime.

An ordinary example of this variety of prosecution is where the witness is a young woman from the East Side, usually a Polish or Russian Jewess, who charges the defendant, a youth of about her own age, with stealing her money by means of false pretences.  They have been engaged to be married, and she has turned over her small savings to him to purchase the diamond ring and perhaps set him up in a modest business of his own.  He has then fallen in love with some other girl, has broken the engagement, and the ring now adorns the fourth finger of her rival.  Her money is gone.  She is without a dot.  She hurries with her parents and loudly vociferating friends to the Essex Market Police Court, and secures a warrant for the defendant on the theory that he defrauded her by “trick and device” or “false representations.”  Usually the only “representation” has been a promise to marry her.  Her real motive is revenge upon her faithless fiance.  In nine cases out of ten the fellow is a cad, who has deliberately deserted her after getting her money, but it is doubtful whether any real crime is involved.