He is presumed innocent, he is to be given the benefit of every reasonable doubt.

He has the right to make his own powerful appeal to the jury and to have the services of the best lawyer he can secure to sway their emotions and their sympathies.

If the prosecutor resorts to eloquence he is stigmatized as "over-zealous" and as a "persecutor." If a plainly guilty defendant be acquitted, not the trampled ideal of justice, but the vision of a liberated prisoner rejoicing in his freedom hovers in the talesman's dreams.
So far so good; we can afford to stand by a system which in the long run has served us fairly well.

But an occasional evil, an evil which when it occurs is productive of great harm and serves to give color to the popular opinion of criminal law, begins only when the lawyers have had their opportunity for elocution.

At the conclusion of the charge the defendant's attorney proceeds to put the judge through what is familiarly known as "a course of sprouts." He makes twenty or thirty "requests to charge the jury" on the most abstract propositions of law which his fertile mind can devise,--relevant or irrelevant, applicable or inapplicable to the facts,--and the judge is compelled to decide from the bench, without opportunity for reflection, questions which the attorney has labored upon, perchance, for weeks.