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

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Reading Time: 3 minutes [392 words]

Here is the translated text as follows:

42 & AMERICAN STATE TRIALS.

Was it that, inoculated with the virus of prejudice against the plea, you should look hatefully upon the proof of it? Or were you to be so blinded by this cataract of denunciation as not to see the defense at all?

If juries have let some men escape under the plea of insanity, are you therefore to hang a madman as compensation to baffled justice? Are you to forget your oaths and stifle your consciences because other juries have been careless of legal obligation? "Attend to your own business" is a wise maxim of private life, and in the jury box it becomes a rule of perfect and infinite obligation. Ah! Mr. Coalter remembers that Worrell's case may become yours or your children's, and be careful how you counsel a precedent, the reaction of which may strike down all you hold dear. I know of no deeper disgrace which may come upon this or any other tribunal of justice than that it should send an irresponsible human being to the gallows. Indignation against crime is a virtue; but indignation may become a crime if we suffer it to make us blind to just distinctions. The very atrocity of crime, which naturally awakens indignation, should also beget inquiry touching the sanity of the actor. Humanity demands this, and experience justifies the toil. The man who would shirk this inquiry, or deride it, or carry on a crusade against it, or sneer it out of court, has not in him the spirit of the law and is not fit to be its administrator. The law, by the very definition of murder, makes the investigation a necessity. It is essential to the crime that its perpetrator should be sane. "Murder is when a person of sound memory and discretion unlawfully killeth a human being, with malice aforethought, express or implied."

"First, it must be committed by a person of sound memory and discretion." Jurors, that is the law of this land. You cannot find Worrell guilty of any crime unless you find him to be of sound mind and memory. The law makes his sanity one of the essential issues of this trial. Yet what have you not heard and read against the plea of insanity in "murder cases"—that recent invention, that modern device of the mid-