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The Green Bag
justice—something that in your words, ought to be for the court-room "what the microscope is for the student of disease"—methods which the Continental jurists have thus far refused to use in the home of the invention? A. (No answer.) After a searching review of a great many authorities, the attorney for the plaintiff went on to discuss the second question. From the cross-examination he emerged even more triumphant on the first question, the discus sion working up to a climax which left the defendant's case with absolutely nothing to support it. Here is an example of the treatment of the question whether the Wertheimer-Jung method of detecting guilt by means of the involuntary association of the ideas is exact:— Now the examples given in your interesting book are too briefly stated to show all the weaknesses of the method as it has been actually tried in Europe. Let us first take, as an example, the detailed report of Loeffle'r, professor of criminal law at Vienna. His experiment was on an assistant state's attorney, supposed to be arrested in a foreign country on suspicion of crime, and trying to pass himself off there as a bookkeeper. One hundred reactions were taken; let us look at some of them. . . . Now we do not lay stress on the radical lack of scientific method here; I mean that those who boast of testing everything by experiment should not affirm that "no bookkeeper would have reacted thus" without finding by experiment whether bookkeepers do thus react. What I desire you to note is the delightful adaptability of this method to a judge s whims, in allowing him to prove whatever he is hoping to prove. For, observe the method as thus used: If the reaction-word is one essentially relevant to the accused's supposed occupation, it is a "betrayal"; if the word is colorless, but its reaction-/ifM* is long, it is also a "betrayal"; if it is colorless and its own reaction-time is normal, but the ensuing reaction-time is long, it is again a betrayal; and if the word indi cates some innocent occupation, it is ignored entirely. Now afterreckoning these four pos sibilities, there will remain only a few reac tions, so that the zealous magistrate is sure to "get his man"; there is no failure; he can always find guilt—if he wishes to. Would you be willing to be convicted on the above inter pretations? A. No. After the jury had been ordered to retire and consult upon their verdict, they were noticed whispering among themselves, and presently they announced they had no need to retire, being already agreed on a verdict, whereupon they announced that they had found for the plaintiffs. Before the specta
tors had all left the court-room, however, the Judge declared that before discharging the jury he wished to make a few comments. He said that he regarded the verdict as just, but the plaintiffs owed their escape merely to the circumstance that the defendant had applied the right epithets to the wrong charges. In his chapters on testimony he had erroneously charged the profession with negligence, but in his last chapter, on the prevention of crime, he had failed to blame them for their ignorance of the science of that subject: — This was just where they deserved the censure which he had elsewhere employed. No country in the civilized world was prob ably so far behind in the scientific study of the criminal law as affected by the contrib utory sciences of sociology, anthropology, psychology, and medicine. In no country had the legal profession taken so little interest in finding out or using what those other sciences were doing. The lawyers left it all to the prison officials, the charitable societies, the sociologists, the physicians; but their own help, though indispensable, they withheld as a profession. In the continent of Europe there were not only a dozen monthly journals devoted exclusively to criminal law, but five or six of these were given exclusively to the modern science of Criminology; some of them were twenty years old; one of them was in Russia. In the United States there was not a single journal devoted to criminal law in any aspect. There was not even a standing com mittee on that subject in the American Bar Association, though there were fifteen on other subjects. . . He had observed in the press that a National Conference on Criminal Law and Criminology had been called to assemble in Chicago in June, 1909. He hoped that this Conference would regard itself as a missionary conference to convert the profession, and would institute propaganda in every quarter. Then tjiere would be hope of speedily redeem ing the profession from the real reproach which it deserved, but did not receive, in the distinguished defendant's interesting and stimulating book. This brilliant article is very exhaustive in its mode of treatment, and the thoroughness with which Professor Wigmore has worked up the subject is to be explained only by sheer love of the joy of the task. A bibliological appendex is appended to the paper, giving the titles of over one hundred articles, treatises, and other publications, practically all in foreign languages, relating to the ex perimental psychology of testimony. Pro fessor Wigmore has done important and valuable work in a new department of the science of Evidence.
