Where Justice Will Have to Look for an Impartial Juror (The Guiteau Case)

Charles Guiteau shot President Garfield in the summer of 1881, and by autumn the whole country had already convicted him in its head. Puck draws the problem as a night scene in a graveyard: a robed woman carries a lantern among the tombstones, reading the markers one by one. The caption explains the search, "Where Justice Will Have to Look for Jurors Who Have Not Formed an Opinion in the Guiteau Case." Only the dead, the picture argues, could come to the trial without a settled verdict. An inset at the left mocks the saturation coverage with a placard for a fifty-million-dollar illustrated edition. A sharp point about publicity and the impossibility of a fair jury, made with a lantern and a field of graves.