Hans Gross

“ I know two men equally well for an equal time, and yet have two memory-images of them. When I recall one, a life-sized, moving, and moved figure appears before me, even the very man himself; when I think of the other, I see only a small, bare silhouette, foggy and colorless, and the difference does not require that the first shall be an interesting and the second a boresome individual. This is still clearer in memory of travels. One city appears in recollection with size, color and movement, real ”

“ If the judge receives their report and sticks to the statutes, if he never shows that he was anxious about their verdict, and merely views it as a number, it is no wonder that in the end the expert also regards his work as a mere number, and loses interest. No man is interested in a thing unless it is made interesting, and the expert is no exception. Naturally no one would say that the judge should pretend interest,—that would be worst of all;—he must be possessed of it, or he will not do for a judge. ”

“ What every criminal lawyer must unconditionally know is the dialect of those people he has most to deal with. This is so important that I should hold it conscienceless to engage in the profession of criminology without knowing the dialects. Nobody with experience would dispute my assertion that nothing is the cause of so great and so serious misunderstandings, of even inversions of justice, as ignorance of dialects, ignorance of the manner of expression of human groups. ”

“ It is, at least, through business-jealousy that one porter hates another, and the reason for it lies in the fact that two of a trade know each other’s weaknesses, that one always knows how the other tries to hide his lack of knowledge, how deceitful fundamentally every human activity is, and how much trouble everybody takes to make his own trade appear to the other as fine as possible. If you know, however, that your neighbor is as wise as you are, the latter becomes a troublesome witness in any disagreeable matter, and if he is often thought of in this way, he comes to be hated. ”

“ If, at night, I put out the lamp in my study and the moon falls on the work, the seven lemurs dance as lively as may be during the time it takes my eyes to adapt themselves from the lamplight to the moonlight. ”

“ What is at work is jealousy, what is to to be shown is love. That is, the evil in the world is due to jealousy, but this cause would be more difficult to prove than its correlate, love. And we know how difficult it is to conceal love,—so difficult that it has become a popular proverb that when a woman has a paramour, everybody knows it but her husband. Now, if a crime has been committed through jealousy it would be simply naïve to ask whether the woman was jealous. Jealousy is rare to discover and unreliable, while her love-affair is known to everybody. ”

“ Charity, self-sacrifice, mercy, honesty, integrity, courage, prudence, assiduity, and however else anything that is good and brave may be called, are always of use to the other fellow but barely and only indirectly the possessor of the virtues. Hence we praise the latter and spur others on to identical qualities (to our advantage) . This is very barren and prosaic, but true. Naturally, not everybody has advantage in the identical virtues of other people, only in those which are of use to their individual situation—charity is of no use to the rich, and courage of no use to the protected. ”

“ Where is the boundary, where a lacuna?
Here, as in all events of the daily life, the natural development of the extremely abnormal from the ordinary is the incontrovertible evidence for the frequency of these events.
Of course one must not judge by one’s self. Whoever does not believe in the devil, and never as a child had an idea of him in mind, will never see him as an illusion. And whoever from the beginning possesses a restricted, inaccessible imagination, can never understand the other fellow who is accompanied by the creatures of his imagination. ”

“ I confess that I regularly mistrust a witness who makes use of an imperfect or some other form not habitual to him. I presuppose that he is a weak-minded person who has allowed himself to be persuaded; I believe that he is not altogether reliable because he permits untrue forms to express his meaning, and I fear that he neglects the content for the sake of the form. The simple person who quietly and without shame makes use of his natural dialect, supplies no ground for mistrust. ”

“ We need exactly as much more knowledge as our task exceeds{16} that of the horse-dealer, but we can not do without knowledge of humanity. The immense onerousness of the judge’s office lies in just the fact that he needs so very much more than his bare legal knowledge. He must, before all things, be a jurist and not merely a criminalist; he must be in full possession not only of the knowledge he has acquired in his academy, but of the very latest up-to-date status of his entire science. If he neglects the purely theoretical, he degenerates into a mere laborer. ”

“ It is well to recall the painful position of an excellent presiding justice at a murder trial, who attacked the defendant passionately, and had to submit to the latter’s really justified reprimand.
The only means of avoiding such difficulties is not to begin quarrelling. Just as soon as a single word is uttered which is in any way improper in polite society, everything is lost. The word is the rolling snow-ball, and how much momentum it may gather depends upon the nature and the training of the judge. Lonely insults are not frequent, and a single improper word breaks down the boundaries. ”

“ When this power is present, it never results in good, rarely in anything indifferent, and frequently forbidden fruit ripens slowly in its shadow. Nobody will assert that ennui is the cause of illicit relations, of seduction, of adultery and all the many sins that depend on it—from petty misappropriations for the sake of the beloved, to the murder of the unloved husband. But ennui is for the criminal psychologist a sign that the woman was unsatisfied with what she had and wanted something else. From wishing to willing, from willing to asking, is not such a great distance. ”

“ Kant says that a man’s honor consists in what people think about him, a woman’s in what people say about her. Another authority believes that honor and a sense of honor are an extension of the sense of self in and through others. The essence of my honor is my belief that I exist for others, that my conduct will be judged and valued not only by myself but by others. ”

“ If, then, the witness has made only the shortest replies and a coherent well-composed story be made of them, the witness will, when his testimony is read to him, often not notice the untruths it might contain. He is so little accustomed to his own prolonged discourse that at most he wonders at his excellent speech without noticing even coarse falsehoods. If, contrary to expectation, he does notice them, he is too chary of words to call attention to them, assents, and is glad to see the torture coming to an end. ”

“ Schopenhauer was the first to classify people according to nature and nurture. Just where he first used the categories I do not know, but I know that he is responsible for them. “Nature” is physical and mental character and disposition, taken most broadly; “nurture” is bringing up, environment, studies, scholarship, and experience, also in the broadest sense of those words. Both together present what a man is, what he is able to do, what he wants to do. A classification, then, according to nature and nurture is a classification according to essence and character. ”

“ That woman is different from man is testified to by the anatomist, the physician, the historian, the theologian, the philosopher; every layman sees it for himself. Woman is different in appearance, in manner of observation, of judgment, of sensation, of desire, of efficacy,—but we lawyers punish the crimes of woman as we do those of man, and we count her testimony as we do that of man. The present age is trying to set aside the differences in sex and to level them, but it forgets that the law of causation is valid here also. ”

“ Whoever has had to deal with certain sorts of swindlers, lying horsetraders, antiquarians, prestidigitators, soon comes to the remarkable conclusion, that of this class, exactly those who flourish most in their profession and really get rich understand their trade the least. The horse-dealer is no connoisseur whatever in horses, the antiquarian can not judge the value nor the age and excellence of antiquities, the card-sharp knows a few stupid tricks with which, one might think, he ought to be able to deceive only the most innocent persons. ”

“ It is characteristic of egoism that it causes people to permit themselves to be bribed by being met half-way. The inclination and favor of most men is won by nothing so easily and completely as by real or apparent devotion and interest. If this is done at all cleverly, few can resist it, and the prepossession in their favor is complete. How many are free of prejudice against ugly, deformed, red-haired, stuttering, individuals, and who has no prejudice in favor of handsome, lovable people? ”

“ We see the same thing with regard to property, the attitude of parents and children, the relation between superiors and inferiors, even in the condition of health,—conduct in all these cases does not reveal the true state of affairs. One after another, people are fooled, until finally the world believes what it is told and the court hears the belief sworn to as absolute truth. It is, perhaps, not too much to say that we are far more deceived by appearances than by words. Public opinion should least of all impose on us. ”

“ What here requires thought is the fact that we criminalists often judge situations we do not know. When the peasant, the unskilled laborer, or the craftsman, does anything, we know only superficially the deed’s nature and real status. We have, as a rule, no knowledge of the perpetrator’s habits, and when we regard some one of his actions as most reprehensible,—quarrel or insult or maltreatment of his wife or children—he responds to us with a most astounded expression. He is not habituated to anything else, and we do not teach him a better way by punishing him. ”

“ Suspicion turns to them especially when an unknown criminal has committed a crime the accomplishment of which required a particularly evil nature and where the deed of itself called forth general indignation. In that case, once a deformed person is suspected, grounds of suspicion are not difficult to find; a few collect more as a rolling ball does snow. After that the sweet proverb: “Vox populi, vox dei,” drives the unfortunate fellow into a chaos of evidential grounds of suspicion which may all be reduced to the fact that he has red hair or a hump. ”

“ Whoever takes the trouble to study the faces of the jury during trial, comes to the conclusion that the speeches of the prosecution and defense are the most important things in the trial, that they absorb most of the attention of the jury, and that the question of guilt or innocence does not depend upon the number and weight of the testimony but upon the more or less skilful interpretation of it. ”

“ We have to assume here the standpoint of absolute rigorism, and to say with Kant, [335] “The lie in its mere form is man’s crime against his own nature, and is a vice which must make a man disreputable in his own eyes.” We can not actually think of a single case in which we find any ground for lying. For we lawyers need have no pedagogical duties, nor are we compelled to teach people manners, and a situation in which we may save ourselves by lying is unthinkable. Of course, we will not speak all we know; indeed, a proper silence is a sign of a good criminalist, but we need never lie. ”

“ Experience does not dispel this illusion. Whether actual training in another direction dulls the natural and free outlook we desire in the witness, or whether, in our profession, education presupposes tendencies too ideal, whatever be the reasons, it is a fact that our hardest work is generally with the most highly educated witnesses. I once had to write a protocol based on the testimony of a famous scholar who was witness in a small affair. It was a slow job. Either he did not like the terms as I dictated them, or he was doubtful of the complete certainty of this or that assertion. ”

“ The most insignificant thing ever seen but variously pictured in imagination will be greeted at first sight with the words: “But I imagined it quite different!” Hence the tremendous importance of every local and material characteristic which the criminal court deals with. Every one of us knows how differently he has, as a rule, imagined the place of the crime to be; how difficult it is to arrive at an understanding with the witness concerning some unseen, local characteristic, and how many mistakes false images of the unseen have caused. ”

“ If we know that a real need was behind the crime, we need no longer wonder at the magnitude of the power. The relation between the crime and the criminal is defined because we have discovered his needs. To these needs a man’s pleasures belong also; every man, until the practically complete loss of vigor, has as a rule a very obvious need for some kind of pleasure. It is human nature not to be continuously a machine, to require relief and pleasure. ”

“ It is not true that it is easy for women really to lie. I do not know whether this fact can be proven, but I am sure the feminine malease in lying can be observed. The play of features, the eyes, the breast, the attitude, betrays almost always even the experienced female offender. Now, nothing can reveal the play of her essential dishonesty. If a man once confesses, he confesses with less constraint than a woman, and he is less likely, even if he is very bad, to take advantage of false favorable appearances, while woman accepts them with the semblance of innocence. ”