011 Page – American State Trials 1918 Volume X Leo Frank Document

Here is the translated text as follows:

### PREFACE TO VOLUME TEN

vii

Outside meddling only served to increase their determination that Frank should suffer death.

Here, justice received its first wound. Every civilized nation has determined that the guilt or innocence of one accused of a crime, and the punishment to be meted out to the criminal, shall be decided by regular Courts of Justice. These courts are presided over by trained jurists, assisted in most cases by twelve laymen—called a jury. This system is the best that civilization has been able to evolve so far. These tribunals may sometimes err, whereby innocent men are sent to the gallows and guilty men are set free, for no human system is perfect. However, the agitation in the Frank case was a protest against this historical and well-ordered method. It was a clamor that questions of guilt or innocence should be decided not by the established tribunals but by popular vote. It was a demand that those tribunals should solve the problem not according to the opinions of its judges, founded upon the evidence, but upon the views of the multitude, founded upon sentiment and rhetoric. It is perfectly clear that this is a denial and negation of all law and of all authority. It is simply Lynch Law, exaggerated and popularized. We cannot try issues of this kind in this way; we cannot decide the guilt or innocence of an accused man or woman by a show of hands in a town meeting or by counting noses on the street. And the people of no state in the American Union are going to acquiesce in this kind of proceeding. No citizen of one state is willing to submit to the inhabitants of the other states the question of whether the decisions of its own tribunals are right or wrong and should or should not be enforced. And this is what happened in Georgia.

From the citizens of Atlanta, indignant at the situation, came a strong reaction.