When Justice John Richard Caverly had finished reading the record of the Leopold-Loeb trial a fortnight ago, he "retired" to "think out" his duty under the Law and to write his brief opinion, and even friends were kept away from his door. So, it is said, the world was shut out of his mind. Alone, with the essential facts of the testimony and the applicable points of law, as raised by opposing counsel, he decided whether two human beings should live or die, a responsibility usually shared by the twelve men of a jury.
Few judges have become widely known because of the part they had in any given trial. Sir George Jeffreys, Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench, "whose yell of fury sounded like the thunder of the Judg ment Day," after presiding (1685) at a series of trials known to history as the "bloody assizes," gained what Macaulay has described as "an unenviable immortality." (Macaulay's History of England, chapter IV.) Kenesaw Mountain Landis, tsar of professional baseball, became a national character when, as U. S. District Judge, Northern District of Illinois, he tried (1907) the Standard Oil rebate cases and impressed a fine of $27,000,000 (a new world's record). But scores of lawyers to one judge have made enduring public reputations out of participating in one famous case. Almost everybody associates the names of William Travers Jerome, as prosecutor, and those of Delphin M. Delmar and Martin W. Littleton, as counsel for the defense, with the several Thaw trials. Hundreds of people today can tell you that James W. Osborne prosecuted (1900) and John G. Milburn and George Gordon Battle defended Molineux. But even lawyers have to turn to the files of old newspapers to find out the names of the judges who presided at these famed trials.
The judiciary today, in its function as interpreters of the Constitution, is, as President Coolidge said last week in his Baltimore speech (see Page 1), the guardian of the people's liberties. But, when the procedure of our trial courts was being framed, judges were the last instruments of tyranny. They did the will of arbitrary rulers long after armed retainers, docile sheriffs and standing armies had lost their terrors. To protect society against
Lord Jeffreys, the procedure of a trial, especially a criminal trial, was designed to check the power of the judge and to increase the importance of counsel and jury.