Saturday, 2nd August 1913 There Is One Joy in Being A Juror: Collectors Barred

Atlanta Journal
August 2nd, 1913

Members of Frank Jury Can Not Communicate With Members of Family and Can Read No Newspapers, Not Even Baseball

How does it feel to be shut up with eleven other men for one week, maybe two, possibly three? How does it feel to be the midst of a city and not of it, quarantined from the wife and children just a few blocks away, from business, from let[t]ers, from newspapers, from everything except six hours of daily testimony on a murder case?

Nobody knows except the Frank jurymen, and they can't tell you, for you won't be allowed to talk to 'em.

For five days and five nights their only companionship has been each other, all they had to do was eat and sleep and hear testimony. And by this time, they are probably worrying.

Sunday comes. No murder trial to hear, but the same strict surveillance to undergo. They will be guarded as carefully as ever, perhaps taken for a little walk some time during the day, but no visit home, no word from their loved ones, no news of what the world is doing.

As careful a watch is being maintained over the Frank jury as any jury ever experienced. Not a single communication is allowed to be seen by a single member unless it is first censored.

The other day it was necessary for one member of the jury to sign an insurance policy. It was scrutinized by the lawyers as if it had been a faded replica of the code of Justinian, but nowhere could these lights of the Atlanta bar find any insurance phrase that might possibly influence that juryman for or against Leo M. Frank. They let him sign it.

When the first of the month ar[r]ived, Deputy Plennie Minor says that there were many requests that the jurymen be allowed to sign pay rolls and attend to other business matters.

Eleven of these twelve good men and true, moreover, are married. Some of them have children. It is just as hard on the wives and kiddies as it is on the fathers and husbands. But while the youngsters can see pictures of papa in the papers and know what he is doing, papa himself ignorant of how things are going with his little sons and daughters. He knows only that they are all right, and will be waiting for him when the trial is over.

But even the adversities of a juryman has its joys. There are no collectors knocking at the juryman's door and of course it is all right with him if the counsel for the defense objects to the juryman being worried by all those first-of-the-month bills.