The reason for the higher percentage of convictions of women is that fewer women who commit crime are prosecuted than men, and that they are rarely indicted unless they are clearly guilty of the degree of crime charged against them; while practically every man who is charged with homicide and who, it seems, may be found guilty is indicted for murder in the first degree.

The trial of women for crime invariably arouses keen public interest, and the dethronement of a Czar, or the assassination of an Emperor, pales to insignificance before the prosecution of a woman for murder.  Some of this interest is fictitious and stimulated merely by the yellow press, but a great deal of it is genuine.  The writer remembers attending a dinner of gray-headed judges and counsellors during the trial of Anna Eliza, alias “Nan,” Patterson, where one would have supposed that the lightest subject of conversation would be not less weighty than the constitutionality of an income tax, and finding to his astonishment that the only topic for which they showed any zest was whether “Nan” would be found guilty.

One of the earliest, if not the earliest, record of a woman being held for murder is that of Agnes Archer, indicted by twelve men on April 4, 1435, sworn before the mayor and coroner to inquire as to the death of Alice Colynbourgh.  The quaint old report begins in Latin, but “the pleadings” are set forth in the language of the day, as follows: 

“Agnes Archer, is that thy name? which answered, yes....  Thou art endyted that thou.... feloney moderiste her with a knyff fyve tymes in the throte stekyng, throwe the wheche stekyng the saide Alys is deed....  I am not guilty of thoo dedys, ne noon of hem, God help me so....  How wylte thou acquite the?...  By God and by my neighbours of this town.”

The subsequent history of Agnes is lost in obscurity, but since she had to procure but thirty-six compurgators who were prepared to swear that they believed her innocent, and as she was at liberty to choose these herself from her native village of Winchelsea, it is probable that she escaped.*

* Cf.  Thayer, as cited, supra.

Fortunately the sight of a woman, save of the very lowest class, at the bar of justice is rare.  The number of cases where women of good environment appear as defendants in the criminal courts in the course of a year may be numbered upon the fingers of a single hand, and, although the number of female defendants may equal ten per cent of the total number of males, not one-tenth of the women brought to the bar of justice have had the benefit of an honest bringing up and good surroundings.

CHAPTER VIII

Tricks of the Trade