st of the crowd pushed through the big
oak doors and they were closed and locked. An officer brought a corroded
tumbler of brackish water and placed it in front of Mr. Tutt. The judge
leaned forward with malicious courtesy. The jury settled themselves and
turned toward the lawyer attentively yet defiantly, hardening their
hearts already against his expected appeals to sentiment. O'Brien,
ostentatiously producing a cigarette, lounged out through the side door
leading to the jury room and prison cells. The clerk began copying his
records. The clock ticked loudly.

And Mr. Tutt rose and began going through the empty formality of
attempting to discuss the evidence in such a way as to excuse or
palliate Angelo's crime. For Angelo's guilt of murder in the first
degree was so plain that it had never for one moment been in the
slightest doubt. Whatever might be said for his act from the point of
view of human emotion only made his motive and responsibility under the
statues all the clearer. There was not even the unwritten law to appeal
to. Yet there was fundamentally a genuine defense, a defense that could
not be urged even by innuendo: the defense that no accused ought to be
convicted upon any evidence whatever, no matter how conclusive in a
trial conducted with essential though wholly concealed unfairness.

Such was the case of Angelo. No one could demonstrate it, no one could
with safety even hint at it; any charge that the court was anything but
impartial would prove a boomerang to the defense; and yet the facts
remained that the whole proceeding from start to finish had been
conducted unfairly and with illegality, that the jury had been duped and
deceived, and that the pretense that the guilty Angelo had been given an
impartial trial was a farce. Every word of the court had been an
accusation, a sneer, an acceptance of the defendant's guilt as a matter
of course, an abuse far more subversive of our theory of government than
the mere acquittal of a single criminal, for it struck at the very
foundations of that liberty which the fathers had sought the shores of
the unknown continent to gain.

Unmistakably the proceedings had been conducted throughout upon the
theory that the defendant must prove his innocence and that presumably
he was a guilty man; and this as well as his own impression that the
evidence was conclusive the judge had subtly conveyed to the jury in his
tone of speaking, his ironical manner and his facial e