Omaha daily bee., 1884-03-31
THE RIOTS.

seriously wounded and etwee nifty
and seventy : FIVE men lost their
lives in Cincinnati during the popular
! outbreak against the miscarriage of JUS
| tice that has disgraced that city. This
bloodshed was due to the leniency shown
| to William Berner, a cold-blooded, self
| confessed murderer, who ought to have
been legally hung, but who was let off
with twenty years in the penitentiary.
Berner is but eighteen years old, and
at the expiration Of his term, which no
can reduce five years by good behavior,
he will be yet a young man. Had the
jury done its duty and returned a verdict
of murder in the first degree instead of
~manslaughter, the people would not have
resorted to mob violence and made an
attempt to storm the Jail, which con-
tanned forty murderers. The YER
dict of manslaughter in Berner's case,
not only excited the people, but it en-
couraged the imprisoned murderers, one
of whom Immediately withdrew his plea
of guilty and concluded to stand trial.
Among these murderers are some of the
most ~atrocious and brutal fiends. 1t is
no wonder that the people Of Cincinnati,
becoming exasperated at the mockery of
justice in the Berner case, rose in indig-
nation and determined to deal out justice
themselves to the cold- blooded destroyers
of human life. Had they once got pos
session of the Jail the murderers would
all probably have been lynched.
Hamilton county would have been saved
an immense bill of expense, and her
magnificent courthouse would not now
be a heap of smouldering ruins.
The responsibility for the present state
Of affairs in Cincinnati rests upon the
juries and the courts, the jury fxers and
the criminal lawyers. In every large
city there are expert jury-fxers, who for
pay play into the hands of criminal law
yers and their clients. Many criminal
lawyers owe their success to the jury
fxer, without whose assistance they never
would have acquired fame and fortune.
The "fxing' of a single juror is fire.
quently sufficient to entirely obstruct the
course of justice, and in nine out of ten
cases eventually defeats it entirely. The
average criminal lawyer of the present
day acts upon the presumption that
trickery and underhand work are per-
missible in the defense of his clients.
he forgets that tho duty of q lawyer is
simply to see that his client has a fair
trial. He goes beyond this established,
but almost forgotten principle, and
makes the trial of a criminal the test of
his ability to defeat justice.
Criminal lawyers, acting upon prinoi-
Pile and conducting their cases in an hon.
orable manner are entitled to as much
respect as any class of practitioner, but
such lawyers aie to-day a
rarity. In murder cases especial
ly the criminal lawyer resorts to ever
possible device, with the sole aim of
building up a reputation by success.
The thief who to-day steals 1856 is
much more liable to go to the peniten-
tiary than a murderer, simply because in
a grand larceny case there is not the in
ducement fora lawyer to exert himself
and employ undetermined machinery as
there is in a murder trial.
Cincinnati, however, is not the only
place where the jury-fixer is the silent
partner of the criminal lawyer. Coming
right home to Omaha we know of law
yers who are reputed to be in collision
with ~jury-fxers, not only in criminal
but in civil cases. 1t is high time that
this infamous practice was stopped.
The alarming extent to which justice
has been thwarted in murder trials all
over the country has become responsible
for numerous lynchings, and at Cincin-
natl it has brought about a bloody riot.
While this is a deplorable state of facts,
it must awaken serious reflection in the
minds of all thinking people to the ne
cessity of a more rigid administration Of
even-handed justice. Jury-fixers and
corrupt iurymen must BIO treated as &C
completes of the criminals whom they Sc
loose upon society.
In an editorial in the April Century
entitled "Mob or Magistrate" the fol
lowing comparison is made between muir
der and the application of justice: cove
against the fifteen hundred murders O
the last year, we have the report @
barely ninety-three legal executions
Many of these must have been cases i
which the crime had been COMMITTEE
during 1882, while many of tn
criminals of 1883 had not ye
} been brought to trial. 1t is no
however, far from the truth to say tina
r while thirteen or fourteen hundred mul
: ders are committed in this country ever
year, fewer than a hundred Of the mui
! derers suffer the extreme penalty of ii
law. When the willful slayer know
that he has thirteen chances out Of fou
aa, sc a.oap;nu tha full Danalty &c ~