der will observe that the percentage of convictions to acquittals
of women defendants averages twenty-two per cent greater than the
percentage for both sexes. A more elaborate table would show that where
the defendants are men there are a greater proportionate number
of acquittals, but more verdicts in higher degrees. A verdict of
manslaughter in the second degree in the case of a man charged with
murder is infrequent, but convictions of murder in the second degree are
exceedingly common.

The reason for the higher percentage of convictions of women is that
fewer women who commit crime are prosecuted than men, and that they are
rarely indicted unless they are clearly guilty of the degree of crime
charged against them; while practically every man who is charged with
homicide and who, it seems, may be found guilty is indicted for murder
in the first degree.

The trial of women for crime invariably arouses keen public interest,
and the dethronement of a Czar, or the assassination of an Emperor,
pales to insignificance before the prosecution of a woman for murder.
Some of this interest is fictitious and stimulated merely by the yellow
press, but a great deal of it is genuine. The writer remembers attending
a dinner of gray-headed judges and counsellors during the trial of Anna
Eliza, alias "Nan," Patterson, where one would have supposed that the
lightest subject of conversation would be not less weighty than the
constitutionality of an income tax, and finding to his astonishment that
the only topic for which they showed any zest was whether "Nan" would be
found guilty.

One of the earliest, if not the earliest, record of a woman being held
for murder is that of Agnes Archer, indicted by twelve men on April 4,
1435, sworn before the mayor and coroner to inquire as to the death
of Alice Colynbourgh. The quaint old report begins in Latin, but "the
pleadings" are set forth in the language of the day, as follows:

"Agnes Archer, is that thy name? which answered, yes.... Thou art
endyted that thou.... feloney moderiste her with a knyff fyve tymes in
the throte stekyng, throwe the wheche stekyng the saide Alys is deed....
I am not guilty of thoo dedys, ne noon of hem, God help me so.... How
wylte thou acquite the?... By God and by my neighbours of this town."

The subsequent history of Agnes is lost in obscurity, but since she had
to procure but thirty-six compurgators who were prepared to swear that
they believed her innocen