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

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Reading Time: 3 minutes [369 words]

Here is the translated text as follows:

LEO M. FRANK. 319

The argument against those men was that they had only cobwebs, weak and flimsy circumstances, and these circumstances were inconsistent with the theory of guilt and consistent with some other hypothesis.

But as to this man, you have got cables, strong, so strong that even the combined ability of the erudite Arnold and the dynamic Roeser couldn't break them or disturb them.

Circumstantial evidence is just as good as any other kind when it's the right kind. It's a poor case of circumstantial evidence against Newt Lee; it's no case against that long-legged Gantt from the hills of Cobb. But against this man, oh, a perfect, a perfect case. And you stood up here and dealt in generalities as to perjury and corruption; it isn't worth a cent unless you put your finger on the specific instances, and here it is in black and white, committed in the presence of this jury, after he had already said that he wrote the financial sheet Saturday morning, and at your suggestion, he turned around and swore to the contrary.

Yet my friend Schiff says—no, I take that back—Schiff says, with the stenographer gone, with Frank behind in his work, that he went home and slept all day, and didn't get up what he called the "data"—well, he's a Joe Darter, that's what Schiff is. It never happened, it never happened, with that financial sheet that Saturday morning, but if it did, it wouldn't prove anything. He may have the nerve of an Oscar Wilde; he may have been cool when nobody was there to accuse him, and it isn't at all improbable, if he didn't have the "data" in the morning, for him to have sat there and deliberately written that financial sheet.

Do you tell me that Frank, when the factory closed at twelve o'clock on Saturdays, with as charming a wife as he possesses, with baseball—the college graduate, the head of the B'nai B'rith, the man who loved to play cards and mix with friends—would spend his Saturday afternoons using this "data" that Schiff got up for him, when he could do it Saturday morning? No, sir. Miss Meming told the truth up until...