Reading Time: 3 minutes [378 words]

LEO M. FRANK. 265

who have worked there in the plant three or four years, have
been induced to come up here and swear that Frank has not
a good character, but the decent employees down there have
sworn to his good character. Look at the jail birds they
brought up here, the very dregs of humanity, men and
women who have disgraced themselves and who now have
come and tried to swear away the life of an innocent man,

I know that you members of the jury are impartial. That's
the only reason why you are here, and I’m going to strip the
state’s case bare for you, if I have the strength to last to do
it. They have got to ahow Frank guilty of one thing before
you can convict him; they’ve got to show that he is guilty
of the murder, no matter what else they show about him,
You are trying him solely for the murder, and there must be
no chance that anyone else could just aa likely be guilty. If
the jury sees that there is just as good a chance that Conley
ean be guilty, then they must turn Frank loose

Now, you can see how in this case the detectives were put
to it to lay the crime on somebody. First, it was Lee, and
then it was Gantt, and various people came in and declared
they had seen the girl alive late Saturday night and at other
times, and no one knew what te do. Well, suspicion turned
away from Gantt, and in a little while it turned away from
Lee, Now, I don’t believe that Lee is guilty of the crime,
but I do believe that he knows a lot more about the crime
than he told. He knows about those letters and he found
that body a lot sooner than he said he did.

Oh, well, the whole case is a mystery, a deep mystery, but
there is one thing pretty plain, and that is that whoever wrote
those notes committed the crime. Those notes certainly had
some connection with the murder, and whoever wrote those
notes committed the crime.

Well, they put Newt Lee through the third degree and the
fourth degree, and maybe a few others. That’s the way, you
know, they got this affidavit from the poor negro woman,
Minola McKnight. Why, just the other day the supreme
court handed down a decision in which it referred to the third

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