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

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Reading Time: 3 minutes [405 words]

Here is the translated text as follows:

LEO M. FRANK. 301

You must do what you must do—you must make Minola's husband a perjurer, and that would be terrible.

You know about that Minola McKnight affair. It is the blackest of all. A negro woman was locked up from the solicitor's office, not because she would talk—she's given a statement—but because she would not talk to suit Starnes and Campbell. And two white men, to their shame, got her into it. Where was Chief Beavers? What was he doing that he became a party to this crime? Beavers, who would enforce the law; Beavers, the immaculate!

Believe Frank was in the factory if you can at 1:30; throw aside all the respectable people and swear by Conley. Well, I know the American jury is supreme, that it is the sovereign over lives; that sometimes you can sway it by passion and prejudice, but you can't make it believe anything like this.

Neither prejudice nor passion, wrought by monsters so vile they ought not to be in the courtroom, could make them believe it. They said that there was a certain man, named Mincey, whom we called as a witness but did not use. Well, the only use we would have had for Mincey was to contradict Conley, and as soon as Conley got on the stand, he contradicted himself enough without our having to go to the trouble of calling on witnesses to do it. If we had put Mincey up there, there would have been a day's row about his probity, and what would have been the use—Conley said time and again that he had lied time and again.

Gentlemen, I want only the straight truth here, and I have yet to believe that the truth has to be watched and cultivated by these detectives and by seven visits of the solicitor general. I don't believe any man, no matter what his race, ought to be tried under such testimony. If I were raising sheep and feared for my lambs, I might hang a yellow dog on it; I might do it in the daytime, but when things got quiet at night and I got to thinking, I'd be ashamed of myself. You have been overly kind to me, gentlemen. True, you have been up against a situation like that old Sol Russell used to describe when he would say, "Well, I've lectured off and on for forty years, and..."