Fred DeWitt Wells

The burly figure and swarthy face of Frederic de Witt Wells were familiar to the dining-room company. Judge Wells—he was always known as Judge, American-fashion, although eleven years had elapsed since his judicial term expired—was perhaps less fond of stating his views of public questions or recalling his municipal court experiences than of discussing his greater adventure, the cruise in a converted Chinese junk from Denmark to America and its shipwreck on the Nova Scotia coast. The narrative of that exploit, with the attendant circumstances of an experimental vessel and a ship’s company indifferently versed in navigation, impressed most listeners with a sense of its wild folly; but Wells told the story with pride as well as animation.

Wells was for twelve years a very useful and efficient judge of the municipal New York court. He possessed a quality not common to that bench—the capacity of discovering both grave and humorous aspects of judicial procedure, and of keeping them apart from one another. His little book on The Man in Court is a thoughtful presentation of the system’s problems, but it is also a series of vivid pictures, drawn with the artist’s touch. “Even an empty court-room,” Wells observes, “is not like other rooms. As in an empty theatre, there remains a peculiar atmosphere of mystery; there also remains the strong, substantial odor of crowds.” In view of certain recent events, there should be interest in our judge’s opinion of the city magistrate himself. That functionary, Wells declares, is usually “a pretty decent sort of person.” If he “plays politics, endeavors to make friends by his decisions on the bench,” his unjust decisions will surely sooner or later come to the knowledge of the community, and ‘‘his chances of re-election are forfeited.” He even “runs the hazard of charges and removal.” If, on the other hand, “he forgets the organization that elected him, and so conducts his court that there shall be neither fear nor favor,” he is classed as “a political ingrate and deserves neither re-election nor promotion.” Of course, Judge Wells continues, “these are the two extremes”; fortunately, judicial as well as ordinary human nature is usually “not what the sociologists and political theorists would make it.” Nor would Wells have it that the occupant of the bench is apt to be an unfair judge. The familiar complaint of inequality in administering justice, of leniency to the financial pirate, the fraudulent art dealer and the wealthy smuggler but harsh sentence for the little milliner, the Italian fruit-vender and the street peddler who have overstepped the ordinances, he sets down as “perversion of the facts.” Those are “only 6 out of 700 cases, selected because they are melodramatic.”

Wells sketches the court-room personality with a genial human interest. From the purely psychological viewpoint, he finds witnesses “incapable of telling the exact truth”; the proof of which is that, “whenever three witnesses go on the stand and describe a thing as having happened in the same way, strong doubt arises in the jury’s mind about the whole case.” Of the juryman himself, Judge Wells’s view is sometimes humorous, but usually at the expense of the court’s own traditions about jury mentality. “Not one cross-examination out of five hundred amounts to anything,” thinks the judge on the basis of his own experience; “the jury make so much allowance for the witness being frightened in the hands of a clever lawyer, that they are not impressed even if she contradicts herself.” If the court rules out a bit of evidence, instructing the jury to disregard it, the juryman considers that procedure utterly absurd. Does the judge or the objecting lawyer “believe for a moment that, because ordered so to do, the jury are going to forget what the witness said, when it is the very thing the jury wanted to find out?” That is to say, the jury is made up of human beings. Our judge, indeed, frankly upholds the jury system. “For determination of actual right and justice,” he concludes, “what is needed is the instinct of the ordinary man,” and he thought the average juryman possessed it.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1930 Century Association Yearbook