If the complainant is, however, bent on bringing the defendant to justice and remains adamantine to the arguments of the lawyer and the tears of the defendant’s family connections, it remains for the prisoner’s attorney to endeavor to get the case adjourned “until matters can be adjusted”—­to wit, restitution made if money has been stolen, or doctors’ bills paid if a head has been cracked, with perhaps another chance of “pulling off” the complainant and his witnesses.  Failing in an attempt to secure an adjournment, two courses remain open:  first, to persuade the court that the matter is a trivial one arising out of petty spite, is all a mistake, or that at best it is a case of “disorderly conduct” (and thus induce the judge to “turn the case out” or inflict some trifling punishment in the shape of a fine); or, second, if it be clear that a real crime has been committed, to clamor for an immediate hearing in order, if it be secured, to subject the prosecution’s witnesses to a most exhaustive cross-examination, and thus get a clear idea of just what evidence there is against the accused.

At the conclusion of the complainant’s case, if it appear reasonably certain that the magistrate will “hold” the prisoner for the action of a superior court, the lawyer will then “waive further examination,” or, in other words, put in no defence, preferring the certainty of having to face a jury trial to affording in prosecution an opportunity to discover exactly what defence will be put in and to secure evidence in advance of the trial to rebut it.  Thus it rarely happens in criminal cases of importance that the district attorney knows what the defence is to be until the defendant himself takes the stand, and, by “waiving further examination” in the police court, the astute criminal attorney may select at his leisure the defence best suited to fit in with and render nugatory the prosecution’s evidence.

The writer has frequently been told by the attorney for a defendant on trial for crime that “the defence has not yet been decided upon.”  In fact, such statements are exceedingly common.  In many courts the attitude of all parties concerned seems to be that the defendant will put up a perjured defence (so far as his own testimony is concerned, at any rate) as a matter of course, and that this is hardly to be taken against him.

On the other hand, if a guilty defendant has been so badly advised as to give his own version of the case before the magistrate in the first instance, it requires but slight assiduity on the part of the district attorney to secure, in the interval between the hearing and the jury trial, ample evidence to rebut it.