The question resolves itself, therefore, into how to get the client off when he is actually on trial.

First, how can the sympathies of the jury be enlisted at the very start?
Weeping wives and wailing infants are a drug on the market.

It is a friendless man indeed, even if he be a bachelor, who cannot procure for the purposes of his trial the services of a temporary wife and miscellaneous collection of children.

Not that he need swear that they are his! They are merely lined up along a bench well to the front of the court-room--the imagination of the juryman does the rest.
A defendant's counsel always endeavors to impress the jury with the idea that all he wants is a fair, open trial--and that he has nothing in the world to conceal.

This usually takes the form of a loud announcement that he is willing "to take the first twelve men who enter the box." Inasmuch as the defence needs only to secure the vote of one juryman to procure a disagreement, this offer is a comparatively safe one for the defendant to make, since the prosecutor, who must secure unanimity on the part of the jury (at least in New York State), can afford to take no chances of letting an incompetent or otherwise unfit talesman slip into the box.