A widespread revival of controversy over the subject of woman’s fitness for jury service may be expected to follow the charge brought by the foreman of the Arbuckle jury against one of its women members. From the beginning, he declared, she refused to consider the evidence, and stoutly maintained that here vote for conviction would stand until skating parties should become fashionable in the lower regions or words to that effect.
The foreman’s statement is not altogether clear on one important point: he fails to indicate whether the lady’s deafness to the evidence developed at the outset of the trial or only when the jury had received the court’s charge and retired to consider its verdict. Since he would hardly feel qualified to review his mental course pursued by a fellow juror during the hearing, we include in the belief that his accusation relates to the position taken by the woman member after the jury had taken the case. Only a confirmatory confession from the lady herself could be accepted as conclusive support of a charge that her verdict was fixed when the trial started.
We will assume then that the offending juroress simply refused to argue the case with the foreman or with her associate members. It is easy to understand how an attitude of that sort might have been highly annoying to shoe who favored acquittal—how it might have been intolerably riling to the men especially, if there is anything more maddening than a woman who argues it is one who refused to argue.
The woman in this case, apparently, did not desire to utilize the superior comprehension or reasoning power of the foreman. Perhaps, feeling that she had arrived at a just decision by her own mental efforts and had the whole matter neatly and conclusively arranged in her mind, she was just a little afraid of a free-for-all argument. We can understand how a woman might have felt that way, and we can also understand how any person, man or woman, might feel that a jury room argument would add nothing to one’s grasp of the case formed by an alert and open-minded hearing of the evidence.
The suspicion will arise in many minds that here is a woman who made up in her mind to convict Arbuckle, not on the pertinent evidence of the case, but on general principles. Many will say that her nature simply rebelled at the thought of acquitting a man who had been revealed as a gross libertine. We imagine that is the opinion held by the outraged foreman. Only the woman herself can say whether it is correct or not.
We would like to have a statement from her, now that the jury has been discharged, reviewing the course by which she arrived at her decision and explaining her alleged unwillingness to consider the evidence. In the meantime, we shall refuse to accept the theory that because she is a woman, she lacks the capacity for rendering a verdict based on the testimony alone.
From the editorial page of the Wilmington Morning Star, Monday, December 5, 1921
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