To read the newspapers one would suppose that the mere fact that the defendant was a female instantly paralyzed the minds of the jury and reduced them to a state of imbecility.

The inevitable result of this must be to encourage lawlessness among the lower orders of women and to lead them to look upon arrest as a mere formality without ultimate significance.

The writer recalls trying for murder a negress who had shot her lover not long after the discharge of a notorious female defendant in a recent spectacular trial in New York.
When asked why she had killed him she replied: "Oh, Nan Patterson did it and got off." This is not offered as a reflection upon the failure of the jury to reach a verdict in the Patterson case, but as an illuminating illustration of the concrete and immediate effect of all actual or supposed failures of justice.
A belief that the course of criminal justice is slow and uncertain, that the chances are all in favor of the defendant, and that he has but to resort to technicalities to secure not only indefinite delay but generally ultimate freedom, breeds an indifference amounting almost to arrogance among law-breakers, powerful and otherwise, and a painful yet hopeless conviction among honest men that nothing can prevent the wicked from flourishing.

Honesty seems no longer even a good policy, and the young business man resorts to sharp practices to get ahead of his unscrupulous competitor.

In some localities the uncertainty and delay attendant upon the execution of the law is the alleged and maybe the actual, cause of the community crime of lynching.