They are, in fact, the precise cases where, if at all, the jury might be expected to go wrong.
But juries would go astray far less frequently even in such trials were it not for that most vicious factor in the administration of criminal justice--the "yellow" journal.

For the impression that public trials are the scenes of buffoonery and brutality is due to the manner in which these trials are exploited by the sensational papers.
The instant that a sensational homicide occurs, the aim of the editors of these papers is--not to see that a swift and sure retribution is visited upon the guilty, or that a prompt and unqualified vindication is accorded to the innocent, but, on the contrary, so to handle the matter that as many highly colored "stories" as possible can be run about it.
Thus, where the case is perfectly clear against the prisoner, the "yellow" press seeks to bolster up the defence and really to justify the killing by a thinly disguised appeal to the readers' passions.

Not infrequently, while the editorial page is mourning the prevalence of homicide, the front columns are bristling with sensational accounts of the home-coming of the injured husband, the heartbreaking confession of the weak and erring wife, and the sneering nonchalance of the seducer, until a public sentiment is created which, if it outwardly deprecates the invocation of the unwritten law, secretly avows that it would have done the same thing in the prisoner's place.
This antecedent public sentiment is fostered from day to day until it has unconsciously permeated every corner of the community.

The juryman will swear that he is unaffected by what he has read, but unknown to himself there are already tiny furrows in his brain along which the appeal of the defence will run.
In view of this deliberate perversion of truth and morals, the euphemisms of a hard-put defendant's counsel when he pictures a chorus girl as an angel and a coarse bounder as a St.George seem innocent indeed.

It is not within the rail of the courtroom but within the pages of these sensational journals that justice is made a farce.