28
The Green Bag
the incidents arising ante litem motam
“Yet what a theme for the pen of the
to the dénouement of final judgment.
serio-comic muse is the fate of that poor chap arrested and convicted in South Carolina colonial days for disturbing a religious meeting, on the ground that when he tried to sing it moved the con gregation to irresistible laughter —a mere nugget from the dramatic material on our office shelves, a mine workable only on the placer theory;
As De Maupassant—-and probably many others—has said, ‘life resolves itself naturally into drama,’ and the shelves
of every law library are replete with heart throbs, containing the plots and the characters for more dramas and better dramas than have been written by the human pen since the days of Aristophanes. For law is life epito
mized, and courts of law have been cynically described as ‘great maternity hospitals for the miscarriage of justice.” “While all this is true, while it is
though, by the way, Mr. Anthony Hope has recently woven a charming love story around a disputed right of way.
“Criminal trials and the quasi-criminal
fit the wheels of a chariot drawn by
divorce and breach of promise litigations appeal most vividly to the makers of plays and to the popular imagination generally. How many young men would select the law for a profession if they did not dream of one day addressing a jury and melting it to tears by their eloquence, like Raymond Floriot in
Pegasus.
‘Madame X’?"
indisputable that every writer
and
dramatist might glean vast stores of humor and pathos from out the hidden world that lies between rotting sheep skin covers, the fact remains that the
grooves
of
legal
procedure
do
not
The Doctrine of Harmless Error HE- Oklahoma Criminal Court of Appeals has plainly stated the policy which it proposes to pursue in ruling upon appeals based upon tech
nicalities not affecting the substantial merits of controversies that may come
before it.
In Byers v. Territory, 103
Pac. 532, the Court declares that it “will not reverse the conviction upon any technicality or exception which
did not deprive the defendant of a substantial right." We quote : “Justice demands that in the ad ministration of law its processes should never be allowed to become a game of
spirit of disgust for law and contempt for courts in the public mind. Reduced to its last analysis, the doctrine contended for by counsel, if recognized, would require this court to hold that, where evidence is admitted during a trial and upon appeal it is held that such
evidence was improperly admitted, a reversal of the conviction must follow,
regardless of the character of the evi dence in the record, upon the ground that, the prosecution having offered this evi dence as a part of its case, it is estopped
from denying its injurious effect.
‘fr:
“It appears to us that this applica
skill between contending counsel. There
tion of the doctrine of estoppel, to the
has been entirely too much of this in the
state, in the enforcement of its criminal
past. It has resulted in the miscarriage of justice in many cases, and has bred a
law, on account of the ignorance or
mistaken judgment of one of its servants,
