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

42 &. AMERICAN STATE TRIALS.

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

Tf juries have let some men-eseape under the plea of in-
sanity, are you therefore to hang a madman as a compensa-
tion to baffled justicet 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
Inaxim of private life, and in the jury box it becomes a rule
of perfect and infinite obligation. Ah! Mr. Coalter remem-
bers that Worrell’s case may become yours or your children’s,
and be careful how you counpel 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 trib-
unal of justice, than it should send an irresponsible buman
being to the gallows. Indignation against crime is a virtue;
but indignation may become crime, if we suffer it to make us
blind to just distinctions. The very atrocity of erime, which
naturally awakens indignation, should also beget inquiry
touching the sanity of the actor. Humanity demands this
and experience juatifies 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 defi-
nition 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 diseretion.’? Jurors, that ia the law of this land. You
cannot find Worrell guilty of any erime 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-