Such are some of the tricks of the legal trade as practised in its criminal branch.  Most of them are unsuccessful and serve only to relieve the gray monotony of the courts.  When they achieve their object they add to the interest of the profession and teach the prosecutor a lesson by which, perhaps, he may profit in the future.

CHAPTER IX

What Fosters Crime

To lack of regard for law is mainly due the existence of crime, for a perfect respect for law would involve entire obedience to it.  Yet crime continues and from time to time breaks forth to such an extent as to give ground for a popular impression that it is increasing out of proportion to our growth as a nation.  Now, while it may be fairly questioned whether there is any actual increase of crime in the United States, and while, on the contrary, observation would seem to show an actual decrease, not only in crimes of violence, but in all major crimes, there nevertheless exists to-day a widespread contempt for the criminal law which, if it has not already stimulated a general increase of criminal activity, is likely to do so in the future.  This contempt for the law is founded not only upon actual conditions, but also upon belief in conditions erroneously supposed to exist, which is fostered by current literature and by the sensational press.

Thus, as has already been pointed out, while it is popularly believed that women are almost never convicted of crime, and particularly of homicide, the fact is, at least in New York County, that a much greater proportion of women charged with murder are convicted than of men charged with the same offence.  To read the newspapers one would suppose that the mere fact that the defendant was a female instantly paralyzed the minds of the jury and reduced them to a state of imbecility.  The inevitable result of this must be to encourage lawlessness among the lower orders of women and to lead them to look upon arrest as a mere formality without ultimate significance.  The writer recalls trying for murder a negress who had shot her lover not long after the discharge of a notorious female defendant in a recent spectacular trial in New York.  When asked why she had killed him she replied: 

“Oh, Nan Patterson did it and got off.”

This is not offered as a reflection upon the failure of the jury to reach a verdict in the Patterson case, but as an illuminating illustration of the concrete and immediate effect of all actual or supposed failures of justice.