2d place, It is
customary for the president of the court to enter into a long
examination and cross-examination of the prisoner, (assisted and
prompted in his questions by the rest of the judges), in a severe and
peremptory style, and what is too often the case with the judge, in his
anxiety to condemn, to identify himself with the public prosecutor. He
appears, in the eye of the jury, more in the light of an interested
individual, anxious to drag the offender in the most summary manner to
the punishment of the law, than as an upright and unbiassed judge, whose
duty it is coolly to consider the whole case, to weigh the evidence of
the respective witnesses, to consider, with benevolent attention, the
defence of the prisoner, and, after all this, to pronounce, with
authoritative impartiality, the sentence of the law. This naturally
prejudices the jury in favour of the prisoner; and few, even in our own
country, who may have been witness to the common routine of our criminal
procedure, will not themselves have felt that immediate and irresistible
impression, which is made upon the mind of the spectator, when he sees
on one side the solemn array of the court, the judges, the officers, and
all the terrible show of justice; and on the other, the trembling,
solitary, unbefriended criminal, who awaits in silence the sentence of
the law. One difference, however, between the effects produced by the
respective criminal codes of France and England, ought to be here
remarked. In England, owing to the principles and practice of our
criminal law, it too frequently happens, that the most open and
notorious criminals escape, whilst the less able, but more innocent
offenders, those who might be easily reclaimed, who have gone little way
in the road of crime, but who are less able to do themselves justice at
their trial, fall an easy sacrifice to the rigour of our criminal code.
In France, owing to the custom of the cross-examinations of the
prisoner, by the president and the different judges, this can never
happen. The notoriety of his character prevents the common feelings of
compassion in the breasts of the jury; the severity of the
interrogations renders it impossible that any fictitious story, when
confronted with his former examinations before the magistrate and the
_Jure d'Accusation_, can long hold together, and he is, in this manner,
generally convicted by the evidence extracted from his own mouth upon
the trial.

The present st