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. Caution requires him to examine the jury in every important
case, and frequently this ruse on the part of the defendant makes it
appear as if the State had less confidence in its case than the defence.
This trick was invariably used by the late William F. Howe in all
homicide cases where he appeared for the defence.

The next step is to slip some juryman into the box who is likely for any
one of a thousand reasons to lean toward the defence--as, for example,
one who is of the same religion, nationality or even name as the
defendant. The writer once tried a case where the defendant was a Hebrew
named Bauman, charged with perjury. Mr. Abraham Levy was the counsel for
the defendant. Having left an associate to select the jury the writer
returned to the courtroom to find that his friend had chosen for foreman
a Hebrew named Abraham Levy. Needless to say, a disagreement of the jury
was the almost inevitable result. The same lawyer not many years ago
defended a client named Abraham Levy. In like manner he managed to get
an Abraham Levy on the jury, and on that occasion succeeded in getting
his client off scot-free.

No method is too far-fetched to be made use of on the chance of
"catching" some stray talesman. In a case defended by Ambrose Hal.
Purdy, where the deceased had been wantonly stabbed to death by a
blood-thirsty Italian shortly after the assassina