The guilt of Moore and Reeves was fully established. This result was foreseen by their friends; and while the trial was in progress they sought by threats and ferocious gesticulations to intimidate the jury. Gathering around the side of the enclosure occupied by the jury, they kept up a continued conversation, the purport of which was that no member of that court or jury would live a month if they dared to find the prisoners guilty. Occasionally, their anger waxing hot, they would draw their pistols and knives, and brandishing them in the faces of the jurymen, utter filthy epithets, and bid them beware of their verdict. Crawford was the object of their especial hate. Their abusive assaults upon him and threats were so frequent and violent that at one time he tendered his resignation and refused to serve, but upon the promise of his friends to stand by and protect him he retained his position. The case was given to the jury at about seven o’clock in the evening. A friend of the prisoners in the court-room nominated me as foreman, but upon my refusal to serve under that nomination I afterwards received the appointment by a vote of my fellow-jurymen.
_Miners’ Judge at trial of Moore and Reeves_ ]
The jury were occupied in their deliberations until after midnight. No doubt was entertained, from the first, of the guilt of the prisoners, but the exciting question was whether they could afford to declare it. They all felt that to do so would be to announce their own death sentence. They knew that the friends of the prisoners fully intended to have life for life. They had sworn it. One of the jurymen said that the prisoners ought never to have been tried by a jury, but in a miners’ court, that he should not be governed in his decision by the merits of the case, but that, as he had a family in the States to whom his obligations were greater than to that community, he should have to vote for acquittal. After much conversation of this sort, which only served to intensify the fears of the jurymen, a vote was taken which resulted as follows: not guilty, 11; guilty, 1; myself, the supposed friend of the roughs, being the only one in favor of the death penalty. It was apparent that further deliberation would not change this decision, and the jury compromised by agreeing to a sentence of banishment, and a confiscation of the property of the prisoners for the benefit of those they had wounded.