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

Here is the translated text as follows:

EDWARD D. WORRELL. 93

Do not heed the counsel that is at odds with the letter and spirit of our laws, as you value all that men should hold dear.

In my opening statement, I mentioned that the apparent motive for the homicide, furnished by the appropriation of the deceased's property, could not be disregarded in determining the state of mind of the prisoner. Sane men act from motive, and as sane men do, unhappily, find in property a motive to crime, such motive is held to be presumptive evidence of sanity. However, it is not always a true test, nor is it decisive. Insanity has its motives as well, and insane men act on motives such as those that move the sane to felony.

While this is so, if the circumstances of each case are closely scrutinized, there will be seen something in the conduct of the insane man that cannot be reconciled with sane action. If he starts with an apparent motive, it does not control his action for any length of time. If you keep your eye upon his action, you will see that something becomes stronger than the apparent motive and begets conduct inconsistent with, or at war with, that motive. You will be startled by something at war with human experience, which you cannot philosophically account for except upon the hypothesis of mental disorder. It is this law of man's action that troubles this prosecution. The evidence they bring of the conduct of the prisoner from the day of the homicide up to his confinement in jail in St. Louis, that remarkable flight, that remarkable pursuit of one thousand miles, is crowded with evidence of insanity.

The circuit attorney called it an ingenious flight that baffled the pursuit of an adroit and experienced police force. Flight! There was no flight, and as for the other epithet, "baffled," if the prisoner had studiously designed to render his arrest a necessity, he could not have taken surer means to accomplish the object. The sole perplexity of Couzins arose from his own ingenuity. Thinking he was after a man who would naturally, by an instinct universal in felons, conceal his whereabouts by feints, all his anticipations were wrong. He marched and countermarched, but his own ingenious errors were corrected by the unexampled publicity and notoriety of the situation.