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

Here is the translated text as follows:

4100 X. AMERICAN STATE TRIALS.

"The blood of Gordon on his soul," he could sit in a theater, finding an interest in its mimetic scenes. He is horrified that Gordon's specter had not the power to drive him from the ballroom. Let him look to the records of insanity found in these books, and the marvel will cease. These facts, which so startle him, are the very marks of that insanity which shows no appreciable lesion of the mental faculties, in which the victim of the disease "never says a foolish thing, but exhibits his insanity only in his actions and his sentiments."

Thus, what fires the prosecutor with indignation happens to be precisely what ought to excite his commiseration. I believe that if Gordon's form appeared stark and stiff before us now, the prisoner would be unmoved at the sight. Is it because he is a desperate villain made callous by a life of crime? Is it because a long career of wickedness has eradicated humanity from his nature? We shall see; we shall see; we have his life before us from youth to manhood, and can answer the question. It comes to us in no "questionable shape." By the witnesses of the State—officers, non-commissioned officers, and privates; by civilians; by men of all vocations in life, and in all places whithersoever an unhappy destiny has carried the prisoner, so as to be seen and known of men—the life is written the same way, the same story is told. Whatever else in this cause may be uncertain, it is certain that we have a correct view of the nature and character of the prisoner, a fact of the last importance in determining the question of his responsibility to law. But if we were ignorant of his past, if we knew nothing of the man but what has been disclosed of his conduct from the death of Gordon to his confinement in the St. Louis jail, is there not something in that narrative which perplexes you by its strangeness? Do the annals of crime or your own experience furnish anything like it? Is there not that in it which makes us pause, which demands explanation, something that should press upon the solicitude of jurors clothed with the power of life and death?

The circuit attorney finds that the murder was determined upon at Hutchinson's the previous night. He thinks the conversation...