Homicide in England and United States.
A Philadelphia paper remarks that the United States and England have exactly the same law on homicide, and that a judge in either country will charge on given facts almost the same thing; so that in theory and on the statute-books, human life has the same protection in both these English-speaking countries. Yet the English jury almost invariably convicts, while the American jury almost invariably tends to acquit, to disagree, or find a verdict for a minor grade of manslaughter wherever there are any conditions which confuse the main issue. The result is that among all lands England is one with the smallest number of homicides and the United States is one with the largest. Kentucky, for instance, has a larger proportion of violent deaths of men by the hands of their fellow men, than any country except Sicily; and parts of states, like some counties of Pennsylvania, have scores of homicides without a single conviction for murder in the first degree. It certainly is a strange comment on judicial procedure when such marked differences exist between two countries whose laws are so similar; that one should be almost without murders, and the other swarm with men who have taken the lives of their fellow men.