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Meanwhile the great argument had been begun in the jury-room, and all the points that had
been meditatively speculated upon in the jury-box were now being openly discussed.
It is amazingly interesting to see how a jury will waver and speculate in a case like this--how
curious and uncertain is the process by which it makes up its so-called mind. So-called truth is a
nebulous thing at best; facts are capable of such curious inversion and interpretation, honest
and otherwise. The jury had a strongly complicated problem before it, and it went over it and
over it.
Juries reach not so much definite conclusions as verdicts, in a curious fashion and for curious
reasons. Very often a jury will have concluded little so far as its individual members are
concerned and yet it will have reached a verdict. The matter of time, as all lawyers know, plays
a part in this. Juries, speaking of the members collectively and frequently individually, object to
the amount of time it takes to decide a case. They do not enjoy sitting and deliberating over a
problem unless it is tremendously fascinating. The ramifications or the mystery of a syllogism
can become a weariness and a bore. The jury-room itself may and frequently does become a
dull agony.
On the other hand, no jury contemplates a disagreement with any degree of satisfaction. There
is something so inherently constructive in the human mind that to leave a problem unsolved is
plain misery. It haunts the average individual like any other important task left unfinished. Men in
a jury-room, like those scientifically demonstrated atoms of a crystal which scientists and
philosophers love to speculate upon, like finally to arrange themselves into an orderly and
artistic whole, to present a compact, intellectual front, to be whatever they have set out to be,
properly and rightly-- a compact, sensible jury. One sees this same instinct magnificently
displayed in every other phase of nature--in the drifting of sea-wood to the Sargasso Sea, in the
geometric interrelation of air-bubbles on the surface of still water, in the marvelous unreasoned
architecture of so many insects and atomic forms which make up the substance and the texture
of this world. It would seem as though the physical substance of life--this apparition of form
which the eye detects and calls real were shot through with some vast subtlety that loves order,
that is order. The atoms of our so-called being, in spite of our so-called reason--the dreams of a
mood--know where to go and what to do. They represent an order, a wisdom, a willing that is
not of us. They build orderly in spite of us. So the subconscious spirit of a jury. At the same
time, one does not forget the strange hypnotic effect of one personality on another, the varying
effects of varying types on each other, until a solution--to use the word in its purely chemical
sense--is reached. In a jury-room the thought or determination of one or two or three men, if it
be definite enough, is likely to pervade the whole room and conquer the reason or the
opposition of the majority. One man "standing out" for the definite thought that is in him is apt to
become either the triumphant leader of a pliant mass or the brutally battered target of a flaming,
concentrated intellectual fire. Men despise dull opposition that is without reason. In a jury-room,
of all places, a man is expected to give a reason for the faith that is in him--if one is demanded.
It will not do to say, "I cannot agree." Jurors have been known to fight. Bitter antagonisms
lasting for years have been generated in these close quarters. Recalcitrant jurors have been
hounded commercially in their local spheres for their unreasoned oppositions or conclusions.
After reaching the conclusion that Cowperwood unquestionably deserved some punishment,
there was wrangling as to whether the verdict should be guilty on all four counts, as charged in
the indictment. Since they did not understand how to differentiate between the various charges
very well, they decided it should be on all four, and a recommendation to mercy added.
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