In other states, when they try a man for his life, they cast a portion of the votes for the defendant,The reference seems to be to some custom somewhere by which in capital cases a number of the votes of the jury were at the outset of the trial given by grace to the defendant. No such custom is, so far as I know, mentioned anywhere else. but with us the accused has not even an equal chance with the sycophants;Isocrates, like Socrates (Plat. Apol. 37a-b), complains that defendants on a capital charge in other states were given a better chance. nay, while we take our solemn oath at the beginning of each year that we will hear impartially both accusers and accused,

we depart so far from this in practice, that when the accuser makes his charges we give ear to whatever he may say; but when the accused endeavors to refute them, we sometimes do not endure even to hear his voice.Cf. Isoc. 8.3; Dem. 18.1-2. Those states in which an occasional citizen is put to death without a trial we condemn as unfit to live in, yet are blind to the fact that we are in the same case when we do not hear with equal good will both sides of the contest.

But what is most absurd of all is the fact that when one of us is on trial, he denounces the calumniators, but when he sits in judgement upon another, he is no longer of the same mind regarding them. Yet, surely, intelligent men ought to be such when they are judges of others, as they would expect others to be to them in like case, bearing in mind the fact that because of the audacity of the sycophants it is impossible to foresee what man may be placed in peril and be compelled to plead, even as I am now doing, before men who are to decide his fate by their votes.