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

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Reading Time: 3 minutes [386 words]

Here is the translated text as follows:

LEO M. FRANK. 375

Leo M. Frank's nervousness can be attributed to the circumstances surrounding the case, yet he returned, like a dog to its vomit or a sow to its wallow, to view the remains of this poor, innocent girl. I ask you, gentlemen of the jury, if you don't know that the reason Leo M. Frank went to the morgue on Sunday afternoon was to see if he could detect anything in the atmosphere indicating that the police suspected him? He admits his nervousness, and he admits being nervous in the presence of the officers. The Seligs say that he wasn't nervous on Saturday night when he telephoned Newt Lee to find out if anything had happened at the factory, and that he wasn't nervous when he read the Saturday Evening Post.

He wanted to avoid the view of any men who represented the majesty and dignity of the law, and he went behind curtains or anything that would hide his countenance from those men.

I return to the proposition that, in the bosom of his family, despite reading the Saturday Evening Post in the hall on Saturday night, this thing kept welling in his breast to such an extent that he had to make a show of being composed and cool. He went in and tried to break up the card game with laughter that was the laughter of a guilty conscience. Notwithstanding the fact that he was able, on Sunday, at the dining table and in the bosom of his family, when he hadn't discussed this murder, when Mrs. Selig didn't know that it was a murder that concerned her, when the whole Selig household were treating it as a matter of absolute indifference, if he wasn't nervous there, gentlemen of the jury, surely he was, as I am going to show you, nervous when he came face to face and had to discuss the matter with the minions of the law.

He was nervous when he went to run the elevator, when he went to the box to turn on the power, and he says here in his statement, unsupported by any oath, that he left that box open because some member of the fire department had come around and stated that you must leave that box open because...