In a few of these the juries convicted of murder in the first degree because the circumstances surrounding the homicides were so brutal that the harshness of the technical doctrine they were required to apply was overshadowed in their minds by their horror of the act itself.

In other cases, where either the accused appeared obviously abnormal as he sat at the bar of justice, or the details of the crime were less abhorrent, they convicted of murder in the second degree in accordance with the reasoning set forth in the foregoing paragraph.

The writer seriously advances the suggestion that the more the brutality of a homicide indicates mental derangement the less chance the defendant has to secure an acquittal upon the plea of insanity.
And this leads us to that increasingly large body of cases where the usual scepticism of the jury in regard to such defences is counterbalanced by some real or imaginary element of sympathy.

In cities like New York, where the jury system is seen at its very best, where the statistics show seventy per cent.

of convictions by verdict for the year 1907, and where the sentiment of the community is against the invocation of any law supposedly higher than that of the State, our talesmen are unwilling to condone homicide or to act as self-constituted pardoning bodies, for they know that an obviously lawless verdict will bring down upon them the censure of the public and the press.