The Light that Lies — Themes and Context

Sampson had been uncommonly successful in evading jury service. By some hook or crook he always had managed to “get off,” and he had begun to regard his trips down to General or Special Sessions--coming with monotonous regularity about three times a year--as interruptions instead of annoyances. Wise men advised him to serve and get it over with for the time being, but he had been so steadfastly resourceful in confining his jury service to brief and uneventful “appearances,” and to occasional examinations as to his fitness to serve as a juror, that he preferred to trust to his smartness rather than to their wisdom. Others suggested that he get on the “sheriff's jury,” a quaintly distinguished method of serving the commonwealth in that the members perform their duty as citizens in such a luxurious and expensive way that they never appear in the newspapers as “twelve good men and true” but as contributors to somewhat compulsory festivities in which justice is done to the inner man alone. But Sampson, though rich, abhored the sheriff's jury. He preferred to invent excuses rather than to have them thrust upon him.

Having escaped service on half-a-dozen murder trials by shrewd and original responses to important questions by counsel for one side or the other--(it really didn't matter to Sampson which side it was so long as he saw the loophole)--he found himself at last in the awkward position of having exhausted all reasonable excuses, and was obliged to confess one day in court that he had reconsidered his views in regard to capital punishment. This confession resulted, of course, in his name being dropped from the “special panel,” for the jury commissioner did not want any man in that august body who couldn't see his way clear to taking the life of another. He “got off” once on the ground that he was quite certain he could not convict on circumstantial evidence, despite the assurance of learned experts that it is the _best_ evidence of all, and he escaped another time because he did not consider insanity a defence in homicidal cases.

Then they drew him for Special Sessions and eventually for the humiliating lower courts, the result being that his resourcefulness was under a constant and ever increasing strain. Where once he had experienced a rather pleasing interest in “getting off” in important cases, he now found himself very hard put to escape service in the most trifling of criminal trials.

He began to complain bitterly of the injustice to himself, an honest, upright citizen who was obliged to live in a constant state of apprehension. He felt like a hunted animal. He was no sooner safely out of one case when he was called for another.

It was all wrong. Why should he be hounded like this when the city was full of men eager to earn two dollars a day and who would not in the least mind sitting cross-legged and idle all day long in a jury box--snoozing perhaps--in order to do their duty as citizens? Moreover, there were men who actually _needed_ the money, and there were lots of them who were quite as honest as the prisoners on trial or even the witnesses who testified.

He was quite sure that if he ever was sworn in as a juror, his entire sympathy would be with the prisoner at the bar, for he would have a fellow feeling for the unhappy wretch who also was there because he couldn't help it. The jury system was all wrong, claimed Sampson. For example, said he, a man is supposed to be tried by twelve of his peers. That being the case, a ruffian from the lower East Side should be tried by his moral and mental equals and not by his superiors. By the same argument, a brainy, intelligent bank or railway president, an editor, or a college professor, should not be tried by twelve incompetent though perfectly honest window-washers. Any way you looked at it, the jury system was all wrong. The more Sampson thought about it the more fully convinced was he that something ought to be done about it.