indirectly, know something about almost every man on the jury, or the Judge will know something about him; and the result of that is that in these smaller counties, and especially in those counties where jury trials take up only three or four weeks out of the whole year, there is not the same pressure for a modification of the jury law as there is under other circumstances. If the jury commissioner in such a small county knows that a certain man is utterly N. G., he doesn't put his name in the wheel. They go on and get a jury that tries two or three weeks criminal and civil cases. That is not the situation in the large cities. In a large city the system, which we had in Cleveland and I think in Cincinnati up to the beginning of the present Fall Term, was that the jury commissioners would gather together a great lot of names and place them in the wheel, and the jury would be selected by the clerk for a three months' period. Now immediately that banishes from all possibility of jury service the men that are active in the affairs of life. No one wants to go to a court house for two dollars a day and sit on a jury for three months. It is unreasonable to expect it, and therefore the jury commissioners do not put in names of men who are active in business life in the City of Cleveland, and there develops what is bound to develop under such circumstances, namely, a set of professional jurors; men many of them honest, many of them absolutely conscientious, but men who during the winter term or during the spring term try to get on the jury. Now the remarkable thing is that out of every one thousand names a large percentage of the same names come out once a year; and there were many men in Cleveland who had served on juries every year for four, five, six or seven years. The result of that was that any lawyer or firm of lawyers who were in court constantly, commenced on the first day of the term to know the jurors, and before the first week, or at least the first two weeks were over, they knew all the new faces on the jury. They knew who they were, and they had any lawyer at a disadvantage who was not in court practically every day trying jury cases. Now the climax came in Cleveland when last spring there was a little bit of newspaper publicity about corruption, and it led to the putting into effect in a sort of irregular way of what had been proposed to the legislature in a bill which was drawn up by the Cleveland Bar Association, of which I want to speak. As to the operation of the Cleveland jury system as it is at present, Judge Vickery, who has been Presiding Judge for this last term, and who is here, can tell you something; and I can say that whatever success we have gotten out of our new system has been gotten because of Judge Vickery's rigid adherence to the rule that a man who comes in must serve. You must, in order to put the new system into effect, have a judge on the bench for the time being who has the nerve to make the man who does not want to serve, serve for the first time. That must be done. So that our system that we are getting such good effects from, I think is due to him, and I am going to ask him when I finish to explain to you, in opening the discussion, just exactly what he is doing, and how it is being put into effect. The only thing which the law which was drawn last winter does, that is the only really important thing, is that it shortens the time of service to two weeks. (A Voice: "Three weeks!"). Well, it might have been three, it is three in practice now. We have been running it for three weeks; but we ran it three months under the old system. I do not know how they do here. That bill was prepared by Mr. John G. White, of Cleveland, who made quite a careful study of the New York and Pennsylvania laws. The excuses which are valid to relieve one from jury duty were very materially decreased, and the law was so made that the list was taken from the poll-books rather than from a list furnished by the jury commissioners. You see the list of names that the jury commission would have to furnish, in order to draw juries every three weeks, is a tremendously long list; and the new bill provided that the poll-books should be taken of the last municipal election and every fifth, tenth, fifteenth, twentieth, etc., name should be taken; every fifth name or every tenth name should be taken off the poll-books and put into the jury wheel. Now there are certain matters to be considered in connection with that sort of a law concerning which I think we ought to have an expression of opinion from the gentlemen here present; for instance, the question is whether it is just to force an artisan who is working for $5.00 a day, or $6.00 a day, and who can ill afford to lose the money, to render two weeks jury service; whether it is fair to force him to come into court and serve on a jury at $2.00 a day, and especially whether that should be done during the season during which he is busy. There have been suggestions made that one way to obviate that difficulty would be to allow a transfer of the service; that is, if a man is a bricklayer and is subpoenaed in the spring or in the early fall, to let him exchange his two weeks' service when he is called in for some other two weeks later on. Now the chief change which the bill that was prepared makes, however, is the drawing of the list from the poll-books rather than from a list of the jury commissioners. Of course the reason for that is that we have found in practice that the jury commissioners' list, as made up by them, continues from year to year to be practically the same list. The reason, as I understand it, that the present law providing for three weeks' service proposes to abandon the commissioners' list is, that the commissioners found that there was too bulky machinery necessary to get together the names. Now what the Judges in Cleveland have ordered in compliance with that law is, to bring in the jurors every three weeks and let them serve three weeks. I am going to ask Judge Vickery, if he will, to speak to you and tell you the way in which this has worked out. So far as the jury system modifications that have been made in this country, they are practically nil. We have the common law jury, except that we have abolished what was in effect when the constitution was first passed in many of the Eastern states, which was that of three jury trials, the best two out of three won the case. The only thing that I have to offer for your consideration is a modification of the jury where the names are taken, as in New York, from the poll-books, rather than from a selected list, and where the term of service is made two weeks instead of a longer period, and the juries are changed accordingly. In Memoriam JAMES W. BANNON AUGUST H. BODE, JR. SCOTT BONHAM HERBERT E. BRADLEY WASHINGTON W. BOYNTON JEROME B. BURROWS DENNIS F. CASH FRANK M. CHANDLER JEPTHA GARRARD LUCIAN L. GILBERT CHARLES W. GILGEN J. T. HOLMES HARVEY R. KEELER JACOB A. KOHLER QUINTIN R. LANE J. M. MCGILLIVRAY W. D. PUDNEY ISAAC P. PUGSLEY ANDREW C. ROBESON GEORGE H. SKILES W. B. STARBIRD JOHN H. STRAMAN R. M. VOORHEES ALBERT H. WEED MEMOIRS JAMES W. BANNON Judge James W. Bannon was born in Portsmouth, Ohio, on September 22nd, 1841. He was a son of Edward Bannon and Bridget Dervin Bannon, both natives of Ireland. He died on March 7th, 1916, at Los Angeles, California, whither he had gone for his usual late winter vacation, and was buried at Portsmouth on March 13th, 1916. On April 24th, 1866, he was married to Mary E. Smith, the eldest daughter of Joseph G. Smith, one of the pioneer iron operators of southern Ohio, and he leaves surviving him his widow and four children, Henry T. Bannon, Arthur H. Bannon, James W. Bannon, Jr., and Charlotte Bannon. He attended the public schools at Portsmouth, Ohio, until he was fifteen years of age, when he entered the employment of a clothing house of that city where he remained until he was twenty-one. During his employment there, he was enrolled as a law student in the office of Judge William V. Peck, a member of the Supreme Court. After his admission to the bar and during the civil war, he enlisted in his country's service and was elected as First Sergeant, Company E, 140 Regiment of the Ohio National Guard. At the close of the war he formed a law partnership with Judge Henry A. Towne, and later with Thomas C. Anderson. He afterwards formed a law partnership with his two sons, Henry and Arthur, who still continue that relation as Bannon & Bannon. On December 14, 1880 and during the first year of its organization, Judge Bannon became a member of the Ohio State Bar Association and has remained continuously a member thereof for a period of more than thirty-five years. He was greatly interested in the meetings and proceedings of this Association. 177 |