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

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Reading Time: 3 minutes [418 words]

Here is the translated text as follows:

LEO M. FRANK. 265

Employees who have worked at the plant for three or four years have been induced to come up here and swear that Frank does not have a good character, but the decent employees down there have sworn to his good character. Look at the jailbirds they brought up here, the very dregs of humanity, men and women who have disgraced themselves and who now have come and tried to swear away the life of an innocent man.

I know that you members of the jury are impartial. That's the only reason why you are here, and I'm going to strip the state's case bare for you, if I have the strength to last to do it. They have got to show Frank guilty of one thing before you can convict him; they've got to show that he is guilty of the murder, no matter what else they show about him. You are trying him solely for the murder, and there must be no chance that anyone else could just as likely be guilty. If the jury sees that there is just as good a chance that Conley can be guilty, then they must turn Frank loose.

Now, you can see how in this case the detectives were put to it to lay the crime on somebody. First, it was Lee, and then it was Gantt, and various people came in and declared they had seen the girl alive late Saturday night and at other times, and no one knew what to do. Well, suspicion turned away from Gantt, and in a little while it turned away from Lee. Now, I don't believe that Lee is guilty of the crime, but I do believe that he knows a lot more about the crime than he told. He knows about those letters, and he found that body a lot sooner than he said he did.

Oh, well, the whole case is a mystery, a deep mystery, but there is one thing pretty plain, and that is that whoever wrote those notes committed the crime. Those notes certainly had some connection with the murder, and whoever wrote those notes committed the crime.

Well, they put Newt Lee through the third degree and the fourth degree, and maybe a few others. That's the way, you know, they got this affidavit from the poor negro woman, Minola McKnight. Why, just the other day, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in which it referred to the third degree.