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

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Reading Time: 3 minutes [411 words]

Here is the translated text as follows:

368 X. AMERICAN STATE TRIALS.

If you were innocent of murder, could any lawyer, Rosser or anybody else, keep you from confronting the accuser and nailing the lie? No lawyer on earth, no lawyer that ever lived in any age or any clime could prevent me, if I were innocent, from confronting a man who accused me wrongfully, be he white or black.

And you, Leo Frank, went in and interviewed Newt Lee down yonder at twelve o'clock, Tuesday night, April 29th. And what did you do? Did you act like a man who wanted to get at the truth, who didn't know it and wanted to get at the truth? Ah, no. Instead of going into that room and taking up with this negro Newt Lee, the man towards whom you had directed suspicion infamously to save your own neck, a man that you would have seen hung on the gallows in order to save your reputation with the people on Washington street and the members of the B'nai B'rith, did you make an earnest, honest, conscientious effort, as an innocent employer would with his employee, to get at the truth?

No; according to Lee, you hung your head and gazed at him not, but predicted that both Lee and you would go to hell if Lee continued to tell the story which he tells even until this good day. And then in your statement here, you try to make it appear that your detective Scott and old John Black concocted a scheme against you and lied as to what occurred on that Tuesday night. The reason why Frank didn't put it up to Newt Lee and try to get Newt Lee to tell him how that murder occurred and what he knew about it, was because Frank knew that Lee was innocent, that he was the murderer and that he was adding to the dastardly crime of assault upon the virtue of this girl, was adding to the crime of murder of this girl, another infamous effort to send this negro to the gallows in order to save his reputation and neck.

Listen to this—he's smart, and just listen how, in his statement, he qualifies and fixes it up so that, when we come back with rebuttal, the technical law will protect him: "They (meaning the detectives) stress the possibility of couples having been let into the factory at night"—by night watchmen? No—"By night Watchman Newt Lee."