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

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Reading Time: 3 minutes [374 words]

Here is the translated text as follows:

856 & AMERICAN STATE TRIALS

The second question will decide whether your hearts are at ease, whether your passions are untouched, and whether your feelings are unaffected now that you have fully heard the charge. You know best. It remains only for me, gentlemen of the jury, to call upon you, in the name of your country, whose interests you are to defend while you protect the rights of the individual. I call upon you in the name of your God, a portion of whose justice you are about to administer, and on your oaths, uninfluenced by favor, partiality, prejudice, or affection, to discharge your duty to your God, to your country, and to yourselves.

I have told you, and I repeat, that it is the peculiar privilege of every citizen of this happy country to place confidence in whom they please, and at the constitutional periods of making new elections, to withdraw their confidence from a former representative and place their trust in another. They may even expatiate on the virtues of the new candidate. However, this does not warrant them to vilify, revile, and defame another individual who is a candidate. Can a good thing not be said of one individual without saying black and damnable things of another? Is it necessary, in order to recommend one man to the presidential office, that you should charge another with bringing on his country war and beggary? The whole forms a perfect chain of malice, falsehood, and slander.

Thus, gentlemen of the jury, I have made a calm, uncolored statement of facts. I have not highly varnished, nor have I said anything but what is consistent with truth. What impression the evidence or charge may have made on your minds, whether your feelings are affected, you and each of you know best. It remains only for me, gentlemen of the jury, to remind you that you are not only to protect the interests of your country but to defend the rights of that individual. In the name of God and of your country, I call upon you to discharge your duty to both and to yourselves.

Mr. Hay called Colonel John Taylor (of Caroline County) as a witness, and he was sworn.