The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser. — 1836-03-25 (Liverpool, Merseyside, England)

TRIAL BY JURY A MOCKERY.  ( From the Dublin Evening Mail.) The best illustrations (in all things but jokes) are practical. From an argument a sophist may escape, but a fact admits of no controversy. The new petit jury system has been the theme of much digcussion—the cautious condemning the innovation on established and approved practice—the liberal and enlightened taking a popular view, and displaying the abstract equity of the proceedings. Nothing but a fair trial could decide the question, and that trial we-believe it has now fully had, and awaits a verdict from an impartial public. We beg most earnestly the attention of our readers to the report of a trial had at the Queen's County Assizes, which have just come to a close. The case was the murder of the late Mr. William Carter, a tenant of Lord Maryborough's, who was butchered in the open day, for some offence against the agrarian code of the Whitefeet. After a trial—on which, it is not too much to say, the indictment was as satisfactorily proved against the traversers as it is possible to conceive, and on which the judge's charge left neither fact nor law capable of doubt—the jury could not be brought to agree—they were dismissed at the verge of the county ; and the pr►soners, though they still remain in custody for future trial, have escaped the present vengeance of the laws, and been enabled openly to laugh at their prosecutors and judges. It is by no means difficult to account for this result. The constitution of the jury ensured it. On that panel sat a person—hut we had better give the account in the words of the provincial local journal, which, of course, is better aquainted with the fact than ourselves :  " Of that number," says the Leinster Express, "the person best entitled to congratulate himself and the public, was one (a small farmer upon the Ossory estate,) who in the commencement of the mob disturbances and agrarian outrages of the Queen's County, was himself convicted at the Summer Assizes, 1829, before Chief Justice Bushe, of a desperate riot in conjunction with a mob at the fair of Rathdowney, where a lamentable homicide took place, whose own sentence of twelve months' imprisonment so well qualified the crown to estimate the value of the jurors, and the latter equally to calculate the benefits which his con federates in outrage might derive from the modern and more popular conduct of its officers." It may well be asked, why the right of challenge which the crown possesses, such a person was suffered to remain on the panel ? The solution of this problem conveys, perhaps, the greatestcharge that has yet been made against Lotd Mulgrave's administration, and shews the utter folly of expecting peace, order, or the supremacy of law, so long as that nobleman remains in -office, or the system which lie administers is suffbred to prevail. We quote once more from the journal already cited, both for the fact and the inferences so conclusively drawn from it :  " It is perfectly notorious that the crown withholds its challenges by tin express order from authority. Nor are those officers to blame, whose previous execution of their duty, and and ample experience in this county, have so well qualified for its performance. By withholding challenge, the crown assists the prisoner in making that selection from the inverted panel, which may hest suit his objects, and thus practically multiplies, to a fatal extent, that right of challenge which the humanity of the law has preserved to him : by this course the very principle of justice is perverted into a protective shield for the murderer, whilst his associates in crime, are armed with her sword and encouraged by her voice." -  The "people"—the emphatic people—" the finest peasantry on the face of the earth—Sir John Davis's lovers of equal and impartial justice, formed a procession to grace the murderer's triumph, and the petit jury's apotheosis, from the Court-house to the verge of the county ; and the prisoners exultingly laughed at (prematurely, we hope) this signal defeat of law and justice.