Thus, as has already been pointed out, while it is popularly
believed that women are almost never convicted of crime, and
particularly of homicide, the fact is, at least in New York
County, that a much greater proportion of women charged with
murder are convicted than of men charged with the same
offence. To read the newspapers one would suppose that the
mere fact that the defendant was a female instantly paralyzed
the minds of the jury and reduced them to a state of
imbecility. The inevitable result of this must be to
encourage lawlessness among the lower orders of women and to
lead them to look upon arrest as a mere formality without
ultimate significance. The writer recalls trying for murder a
negress who had shot her lover not long after the discharge of
a notorious female defendant in a recent spectacular trial in
New York. When asked why she had killed him she replied:
"Oh, Nan Patterson did it and got off."
This is not offered as a reflection upon the failure of the
jury to reach a verdict in the Patterson case, but as an
illuminating illustration of the concrete and immediate effect
of all actual or supposed failures of justice.
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