But the fact that a small boy sometimes sees something funny at a funeral, or a bevy of giggling shop-girls may be sitting in the gallery at a fashionable wedding, argues little in respect to the solemnity or beauty of the service itself.
What are the celebrated cases--the trials that attract the attention and interest of the public?
In the first place, they are the very cases which contain those elements most likely to arouse the sympathy and prejudices of a jury--where a girl has taken the life of her supposed seducer, or a husband has avenged his wife's alleged dishonor.

Such cases arouse the public imagination for the very reason that every man realizes that there are two sides to every genuine tragedy of this character--the legal and the natural.

Thus, aside from any other consideration, they are the obvious instances where justice is most likely to go astray.
In the next place, the defence is usually in the hands of counsel of adroitness and ability; for even if the prisoner has no money to pay his lawyer, the latter is willing to take the case for the advertising he will get out of it.
Third, a trial which lasts for a long time naturally results in creating in the jury's mind an exaggerated idea of the prisoner's rights, namely, the presumption of innocence and the benefit of the reasonable doubt.
For every time that the jury will hear these phrases once in a petty larceny or forgery case, they will hear them in a lengthy murder trial a hundred times.

They see the defendant day after day, and the relation becomes more personal.

Their responsibility seems greater toward him than toward the defendant in petty cases.
Last, as previously suggested, murder cases are apt to be inherently weaker than others, and more often depend upon circumstantial evidence.
The results of such cases are therefore an inadequate test of the efficiency of a jury system.