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

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Here is the translated text as follows:

44 X. AMERICAN STATE TRIALS.

You are to judge by intuition, not by reason. You are to cut yourself off from the influence of all knowledge gained by others after long study and painful examination of the human mind in ruins, and trust to instinct. Your own unenlightened reason is not even to guide you. It is a question only of eyesight! As the afflicted were "to look on the golden image and live," so you are "to look and determine." This is simple and summary, and, one would suppose, final, too; for if error should happen, by an accident, to get into the process, there can be no correction. The counsel exclaims, "Why resort to books on insanity, to works on medical jurisprudence, to the opinions of the learned, etc., for the tests there laid down? Does not every man know an insane man when he sees him!"

Jurors, if this declaration had come from another quarter—if it had been an emanation from the simplifiers, it would have created no surprise, for their hostility to both learning and knowledge is both natural and logical; but from the lips of the counsel, it may well fill with astonishment all who know him. When before did he ever start a crusade against science, or pander to the pride of ignorance?

The vulgar idea of insanity does conform to the proposition advanced. Raving maniac or utter imbecility, violent and incoherent jargon, make up the vulgar conception of madness, and hence almost every case of feigned insanity takes the one or the other of these forms. The insanity that cannot be seen at a glance is rarely assumed. If the disease is not patent on the surface, the simulator avoids it as unsuited to his purpose. If it be latent, difficult of detection, requiring, like any other secret inflammation, skill and knowledge, and patient examination to find it out—if, especially, it be of that type which most resembles crime, the criminal is sure never to feign it. He would as soon forge a note, a bank note, which, after the most successful imitation, would not be regarded as a bank bill by anyone.

If anything be certain in our knowledge of the human mind, it is that insanity, in some of its phases, can be detected only by a severe scrutiny and a patient examination, conducted with a skill enlightened by long experience and familiarity.