New Zealand Mail. PUBLISHED WEEKLY. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1886.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 764, 22 October 1886, Page 16

New Zealand Mail. PUBLISHED WEEKLY. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1886.

The remarks made by Mr Justice ■Richmond, on discharging the jury at the close of the recent criminal sessions of the Supreme Court in Wellington, have excited, as might have been expected, a good deal of comment on the part of the newspapers. In one or two instances the views taken seem to us perverted and unjust. We have already dealt with one strangely erroneous theory of the relations existing between Judge and jury. We treated the subject solely from the practical stand point of the public benefit, but a great deal more micfiit have been said with reference to °the relative positions theoretically held by Judge and jury under constitutional law. Those who care to pursue the subject will find that a Judge, when on the Bench, is

deemed to represent the Sovereign, and therefore cannot be held to take only equal rank with the jury. This, however, does not affect the practical side of the question, which is the one of importance to the public. A different, and in our opinion wholly unwarrantable, ground is taken up by one of our country contemporaries, who treats the matter as a pure ebullition of “temper” on the part of the Judge. This idea is so glaringly unjust and untenable, in view of the facts of the case, that we can only suppose our contemporary’s utterances were offered in entire ignorance of the circumstances. After remarking, rather rudely, “ your common juror is but too frequently an ill-educated, chuckleheaded, ass, but—and the but is important—it is rather unwise to tell him so,” the journal to which we refer proceeds to say :—“ So long as the jury system holds good, juries will make mistakes and incur a Judge’s ill-will, but Judges should learn to control their temper; jurymen are not —like the Pope—infallible, and if they do blunder, they may fairly claim to be excused and not abused.”

These are mere platitudes. Nobody will dispute such trite aphorisms, but they are utterly irrelevant. It is ridiculous to talk of a Judge’s “ill-will” and “temper” in this connection. Assuredly there was not a trace of “ temper ” in the remarks which have aroused all the hubbub ; nor was it the mere “ blundering ” of the jury that the Judge censured so severely. The serious phase of the'late criminal session was that some of its incidents tended gravely to bring the administration of justice into contempt and disrepute; to “degrade, deeply degrade” the Court, as his Honour truly put it, and surely that is a phase to which judicial attention may most reasonably be directed. The point was that in certain cases the juries persisted in returning verdicts utterly and wildly inconsistent with the evidence. The results were-some flagrant miscarriages of justice, the escape of some very great rascals from the punishment that was their just due, and the casting of an implied but most undeserved doubt on the veracity of some highly respectable witnesses. The facts were so well known, and so clearly established by sworn and unshaken testimony, that the return of verdicts flatly in opposition to those wellknown facts and to that unshaken testimony was necessarily calculated to inspire the gravest misgivings as to the sort of justice to be expected from such jurymen. Naturally, the public at large felt that if these undoubtedly guilty persons were thus to be freed from the penalties of their misdoings, and turned loose unpunished to begin a new career of rascality and robbery, a serious peril to the community was involved. All confidence on the part of the law-abiding citizen in the certainty or probability of chastisement overtaking the evildoer, and all dread of this consequence, on the part of the criminal, would be alike swept away. The irresistible consequence here, as elsewhere, would be the gradual growing up of a tendency to resort to Lynch law—to “ take the law into one’s own hands ” —in eases of wrong sustained. Nay, more ; the public cannot but feel an apprehension that if one set of jurymen will thus shamefully strain the law and ignore their oaths to bring about the escape of certain favoured criminals, another set might be found to strain matters the other way, and to convict wrongfully-accused, persons on grossly insufficient evidence. One injustice is the correlative of the other. If jurymen break their oath for the sake of doing injustice in one direction, they may do the same thing on the other side. In short, such results as those which followed certain recent trials in Wellington are a deep blot on our administration of justice, a crying public scandal,“f and a wrong and injustice to the whole community. It was the plain duty of the Judge to denounce in the plainest and severest terms so gross a disregard of the obligations alike of public and of private morality and duty, and, in our opinion, his Honour would have failed in his duty had he discharged the jurymen without uttering a strong protest against the discredit brought upon the Court by the conduct of some of tieir number. ' *»