The Philadelphia Inquirer - Wednesday, May 29, 1895
This report was originally published in English. Machine translations may be available in other languages.
Recent unsavory trials in England ought to call thoughtful attention to the swiftness with which justice is administered in Great Britain, as compared with the delays and the resort to technicalities and subterfuges which mark the efforts to punish criminals in our own country. When the Marquis of Queensberry was put on trial for criminal libel, the trial ended in two days, and Wilde was immediately arrested. Three weeks afterwards he was in the dock; in a few hours a jury was secured and it disagreed. In less than a month he was again tried, convicted and sentenced and is now serving his term of imprisonment.
Had the case been tried in this country, it would have been entirely different. Then we would have had the spectacle of a long array of talesmen, of scores of jurymen challenged, of conviction, of the granting of a new trial, of the progress of that trial, of an appeal to the State Supreme Court and then in all likelihood of an appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States; and all this would probably have taken two years instead of, as in the Wilde case, only seven weeks.
There are sufficient safeguards thrown by our institutions around the rights, the privileges and the liberties of the humblest citizen, without needing to have recourse to tactics which make a mockery of, if they do not defeat, the ends of justice.