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

Here is the translated text as follows:

84 & AMERICAN STATE TRIALS.

Gentlemen! Peer with the eyes of the mind through the infinitely possible combinations of circumstances, and group together facts in such a way as to save her. She is innocent! She has shed no blood! She was asleep when the deed was done! Her mistress died by the hands of others! I say others—and the innocent slumberer did not learn of the tragedy until hours after her mistress was in heaven or hell! Oh! Can you not see it? Reason out her innocence! Summon your imagination to the help of a poor girl! It is hard that the reasoning process, so loftily praised, so loudly eulogized in speech, so elaborately complimented in the fine rhetoric of judicial philosophy, should be unable to work out the innocence of one poor girl!

I think I hear her counsel say, "This evidence is not fit to take life; all may be true that you have proved, and still she may be innocent, and if this be possible, the law declares she shall not die on such circumstantial testimony. There may have been a false key and entrance by it and exit after the murder. It was a two-story house, and there is no proof that the windows were fastened in the upper story. It might be that a ladder carried the assassin up to one of them through which he descended below, killed the sleeping mistress, and returning on his path gained the ground; when, removing the ladder, he removed all trace of his entrance and his crime. It may be in other modes, that do not present themselves to my mind, the deed was done by others—the thing is possible—the proof does not necessarily and certainly show her guilt; and that is the legal test of sufficiency." I hear the counsel for the Crown say, "These speculations are fancy work, the inventions of ingenious lawyers, contrived to screen guilt and baffle justice! A false key! What evidence is there of a false key? A ladder! Who proves there was ever one near the house since it was erected? Jurors act on facts, not on nice and cunning theories—they render verdicts on testimony, not on fine-spun subtleties of advocates; and this testimony establishes her guilt."

The cases supposed by the counsel for the girl ought to have saved her; they were enough to show that every hypothesis...

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