070 Sheet – American State Trials 1918 Volume X Leo Frank Document

Search for:

Reading Time: 3 minutes [389 words]

Here is the translated text as follows:

38 X. AMERICAN STATE TRIALS.

Indignation so deep and so universal was felt, and Providence supplied what indignation could not furnish.

Thus, in limine, my friend would have your feelings prejudge the case. He would have you enlightened by the judgment—the foregone conclusion—of a "whole people," and awe you against any resistance to their decree. Into this sacred temple, whither Justice has retired, calmly, severely, and carefully to weigh, to deliberate, and to mature her even judgment, my friend madly rushes and flings the passions of a multitude into the scales.

His classic memory alone ought to have saved him from the error. When Orestes, wet with a father's blood, fled from the Temple of the Pythoness, pursued by the Furies, they ceased their howl as soon as their intended victim embraced the Statue of Pallas; nor did they enter the Amphictyonic Council, which sat afterwards to decide the fate of the refugee. With the Greeks, Passions stood mute in the presence of Wisdom, and the genius of that people shut them quite out of the Temple of Justice. The spirit of our law is wiser than Minerva, and this tribunal is greater, more sacred, than the Amphictyonic Council of Greece.

To transfer the excitement of Warren County to this tribunal is to defeat a statute, dictated by every sense of justice a noble commonwealth may feel. I do not pass judgment upon "the people of Warren." I neither censure nor praise their excitement touching the homicide of Gordon. I only know that, worthy or unworthy, it has no business here—it is an alien element, out of place. It cannot come here legally, nor be brought here except at the expense of justice. This "excitement" was adverse to the purposes of legal justice; for that cause only, the law sent the accused away from Warren County, to be tried in some spot out of the reach of a disturbing element. The law passed no censure on the people of Warren, nor do I, and this tribunal was not the forum in which my friend was called upon to stand forth as the champion of the people of Warren. His prowess was not challenged to any such effort, nor can he lawfully here seek to vindicate "a whole people" by dwelling on the noble qualities of the deceased.