Chapter XXX: Twelfth Day of the Trial (1)

On Monday morning Ex-Governor George D. Robinson made his plea for the prisoner which was as follows:

May it Please Your Honors, Mr. Foreman and Gentlemen—One of the most dastardly and diabolical of crimes that was ever committed in Massachusetts was perpetrated in August, 1892, in the city of Fall River. The enormity of it startled everybody, and set all into diligent inquiry as to the perpetrator of such terrible acts. Our society is so constituted, gentlemen, that every man feels that the right must be done and the wrong punished and the wicked doer brought to his account as promptly as due procedure of law will permit. Here, then, was a crime with all its horrors, and well may those who stood first to look at the victims have felt sickened and distressed at heart, and human nature be broken so that the experience of a lifetime will never bring other such pictures. “Who could have done such an act?” says everybody. In the quiet of home, in the broad light of an August day, upon a street of a populous city, with houses within a stone’s throw, nay, almost within touch, who could have done it? Inspection of the victims disclosed that Mrs. Borden had been slain by the use of some sharp and terrible instrument, inflicting upon her head eighteen blows, thirteen of them crushing through the skull; and below, lying upon the sofa, was Mr. Borden’s dead and mutilated body, with eleven strokes upon the head, four of them crushing the skull. The terrors of those scenes no language can portray. The horrors of that moment we can all fail to describe. And so we are charged at once, at the outset, to find somebody that is equal to that enormity, whose heart is blackened with depravity, whose whole life is a tissue of crime, whose past is a prophecy of that present. A maniac or fiend we say. Not a man in his senses and who has heart right, but one of those abnormal productions that deity creates or suffers, a lunatic or a devil. So do we measure the degree of character or want of it, that could possibly prompt a human being to such acts. They were well-directed blows. They were not the result of blundering. They were aimed steadily and constantly for a purpose, each one finding its place where it was aimed, and none going amiss on the one side or the other. Surely we are prompted to say at the outset that the perpetrator of that act knew how to handle the instrument, was experienced in its control, had directed it before or others like it, and it was not the sudden, untrained doing of somebody who had been unfamiliar with such implements. Now, suspicion began to fall here and there. Everybody about there was called to account so far as could be. That is proper. That is right and necessary. Investigation proceeds. The police intervene. They form their theories. They proceed to act. They concern this one and that one. They follow out this and that clew. They are human only. When once a theory possesses our minds you know how tenaciously it holds the place, and how slow the mind is to find lodgment in something else. Now, no decent man complains of investigation. No one says there ought not to have been anything done. Everything ought to have been done. Nay, more, we say everything was not done and that the proper pursuit was not taken. Now, proceed with this matter a little and let us see how it stands. A person is charged with a crime, like this defendant, suspicions surround her, investigations in regard to her proceed, and inevitably, naturally, if the matter is deemed of consequence, she is brought before the court, the district court in that instance, to have an examination preliminary into the probabilities of the crime on her part. Then if she, having nothing to do with it, having no control of it, having no opportunity to accept, to be heard, be bound and compelled to answer to this court, what then? Then the grand jury of the county is called together and sits by itself under the direction of the district attorney, to investigate and see whether it ought to come before a jury like yourselves. Now remember that at that time, and when this indictment of last December was framed, this defendant had no voice, it was purely one sided. They said, “We make this charge, serious as it is, against the defendant. We will ask her to come to the Bristol county court house and meet that charge, and if we cannot prove it against her in the ordinary way she shall go free: she is not guilty.”

Now, that is one sided up to that point, practically, and so you are to draw no inference whatever, and I know you will not; you will draw no inference whatever as against this defendant until you have heard the evidence in this case, in this court room, at this time. You have nothing to do with what was done in Fall River any more than you have with what is now proceeding in Australia. The finding of Judge Blaisdell of the district court in Fall River, worthy man as he may be, is of no sort of consequence here, and has no sort of influence or obligation over you. We would not be safe if in these great crises our lives hung upon the decision of a single man in a prejudiced and excited community. No, we walk away from Fall River, we come down to the broad seashore, we sniff the breezes of the sea, and here is freedom, here is right, here are you, gentlemen. I say, then, at the outset, as you begin to contemplate this crime and its possible perpetration by the defendant, you must conclude at the outset that such acts as those are morally and physically impossible for this young woman defendant. To foully murder her stepmother, and then go straightway and slay her own father is a wreck of human morals; it is a contradiction of her physical capacity and her character. Now, before I pass, let me say that this defendant complains of no prosecution on the part of the district attorney of this district. He has only one duty, and that is, as a gentleman and lawyer, to conduct this investigation so that the truth as to her may be elicited. With his well-earned reputation and his high standing at the bar he would have no need to search for laurels for his fame, and he is one of the last men that would demean himself so as even to think of it. He stands above the miserable assertions that unthinking people will make, and he walks into this court room only as the representative of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, that is, yours and mine and his, and says: Gentlemen, all I have to show you is the case we have against this woman. And if the case I have brought to me by the Fall River police is not sufficient, or you have any doubt about it, he will say, if he speaks what his heart prompts him to utter, he will say, “For God’s sake, say so, like men, and Bristol county will be the happier and the securer afterward.” He is not here for blood, neither is he helped to such dishonorable work, if it were attempted, by our excellent friend, the district attorney from the great county of Essex, one of our best and most reliable lawyers. So you will see no small play, you will see no mean tactics on the part of the commonwealth here, but only a presentation not overstrained in one jot or one tittle, a presentation of what has been proven here, and only that. So merciful is our provision of the law that a defendant shall have a decent chance that she becomes convinced how faithfully that is carried out when she recalls the numerous kindnesses and considerations on the part of the sheriff of this county. He has done with her, not as a convicted criminal, but as a young woman of his county, entitled to her rights, guaranteed to her in the constitution and laws of our State. And so she comes into this court, presided over by our best of the judiciary, clean, able, honorable gentlemen, who sit vigilantly upon the bench to guard against any possible wrong, who want the commonwealth’s case tried, but the defendant to pass without abuse or wrong, and taking the law into your hands as they will give it to you, you have only to deal with the facts. I said the case was brought to the district attorney by the Fall River police. I have not time to go into sarcasm or denunciation of those gentlemen. They are like a great many bodies of police that you find in all communities. Policemen are human, made out of men, and nothing else, and the blue coat and the brass buttons only cover the kind of a man that is inside. And you do not get the greatest ability in the world inside a policeman’s coat. You may perhaps get what you want, and what is sufficient, but you must only call upon him for such services as he can render. Now, when a police officer undertakes to investigate a crime, he is possessed and saturated with the thoughts and experiences he has with bad people. He is drifting and turning in the way of finding a criminal, magnifying this, minimizing that, throwing himself on this side in order to catch somebody, standing before a community that demands the detection and punishment of the criminal, blamed if he does not get somebody into the lockup before morning. “What are the police doing?” says the newspaper, and the newspapers, you know, are not always right, mostly. Saying to him: “Look here, Mr. Marshal, these murders were committed yesterday and we haven’t a murderer in the lockup. Get somebody in.” Now they are sensitive to all those expressions. Naturally policemen, feeling the responsibility of their office, must go there and do just such work as that, in that way. That can only be expected of them. And when they come upon the witness stand they reveal their weakness, do they not? They knock their own heads together. They make themselves, as a body of men, ridiculous, insisting that a defendant shall know everything that was done on a particular time, shall account for every moment of that time, shall tell it three or four times alike, shall never waver or quiver, shall have tears, or not have tears, shall make no mistakes. But they, stripped of their blue clothes, and in their citizens’ garb, show themselves to be only men here, and liable to human infirmities and errors. Now I dismiss them without any unpleasant reflection. I will talk about them a little later on: but I have nothing to say now, any more than this, that you must not ask of them more than they ought to give, you must not be surprised that they fail even of the standard that they set up for everybody else. So I say to you, as a distinguished advocate in a similar cause expressed himself to the jury: This defendant comes before you perfectly satisfied that the jury is the most refreshing prospect in the eye of accused innocence ever met in human tribunal. Who are you twelve men, and how came you here? Selected out of one hundred and fifty men that were drawn from the body of this county, passing the gauntlet of criticism and objections put upon you by the court or the attorneys, you are sworn here in this cause. Who are you? Men: Bristol county men. Men with hearts and men with heads, with souls, and men with rights. You come here in obedience to the laws that we prescribe for the orderly administration of our courts. You come here because, in answer to the demand, you feel that you must render this great service, unpleasant and trying as it may be, exhaustive as are its labors; you come here because you are loyal men to the State. Nay, more. You are out of families, you come from firesides, you are members of households, you have wives and daughters and sisters and you have had mothers, you recognize the bond that unites and the flash that plays throughout the households. Now bring your hearts and your homes and your intellects here and let us talk to you as men, not as unmeaning things.

The clerk swore you to your duty, and perhaps you did not hear that oath so closely as I did. But I heard him say, “You shall well and truly try and true deliverance make between the commonwealth and the defendant, whom you shall have in charge.” In no case except a capital case is the oath offered in that way—“whom you shall have in charge.” And Lizzie Andrew Borden from the days when we opened this trial until this hour, has been in your charge, gentlemen. That is the oath you took. And not alone with you, Mr. Foreman, or any one of you, but with each and all of you. You have her in charge. Now has come the time when not alone her lawyers are to speak for her, not alone the judges are to watch for protection, not alone is the learned attorney of the commonwealth to ask no more than he ought to have, but the twelve men who sit here to try this question take the woman in this charge, and the commonwealth says, “We intrust her to you.” Now that is your duty. She is not a horse, she is not a house, she is not a parcel of land, she is not the property of anybody, but she is a free, intelligent, thinking, innocent woman, in your charge. I noticed one day as we were proceeding with this trial, a little scene that struck me forcibly. It was one morning as the court was about to open, when you were coming into your seats and standing there and the judges were passing to the bench to take their positions and the defendant was asked to pass around from the place where she now sits in order that she might come in so as to be near her counsel, and right at that moment of transition she stood here waiting between the court and the jury; and waited in her quietness and calmness until it was time for her properly to come forward. It flashed through my mind in a minute; there she stands protected, watched over, kept in charge by the judges of this court and by the jury who have her in charge.

If the little sparrow does not fall unnoticed to the ground, indeed, in God’s great providence this woman has not been alone in this court room, but ever shielded by his providence from above and by the sympathy and watchful care of those who have her to look after. You are trying a capital case, a case that involves a human life, a verdict in which against her calls for the imposition of but one penalty, and that is that she shall walk to her death. You are then to say, “I will critically consider this question, and I will make no mistake, because if I do, no power on earth or in heaven can right the wrong.” You come here without prejudice or bias, I take it. You said you did. I believed you. I believe you now. You said that though you might have read about this transaction, you might have formed an opinion, might have expressed an opinion, as I think some of you with perfect honesty said, because in this intelligent age people do think and read and talk, and it is all right they should, but when a man is big enough to walk up and say in answer to the questions the chief justice put to him, “I have read and thought and judged about it, and I stand up here now, and before my God and my people, say I will find a true verdict on the evidence under the law.” That is a man we all want to see in the jury box. I would rather see him there than to have one of these miserable pieces of putty on whom the last man who stuck his finger into him can make an impression. You will need at the outset, gentlemen, to dismiss from your minds entirely everything that the press ever said about the case, anything that your neighbors have ever said about it, anything that you have ever heard about it except in this court room at this time. Every rumor, every idle tale or every true tale that has been told you must banish from your minds absolutely and forever. Why, gentlemen, if we were to try the case on the street we need not have spent these days and you would have been enjoying your entire freedom like the rest of us, you would not have been prisoners yourselves. But we are not trying the case in this way. And so certainly, I believe, does the court guard it, that you are shut off from reading the newspapers, from having communications, from indulging in conversation about the case during the progress of the trial. What use in taking these precautions if you are all coming in with your heads brim full of what you have heard before and will not give that up? Now every man of you is man enough to say, when you go to the jury room to deliberate on this thing, and somebody presents an idea. “Well, that is not in this case. You have no right to consider any such thing. You have no more right to do it than you have to take a knife and cut this woman’s throat”—I mean under your duties as prescribed by the law. Then you come here patiently day after day, and you will sit here again and again until this case is concluded, and then proceed with your deliberation with that calmness and fidelity that is guaranteed in the expression of your countenance.

When the life of man is in debate
No time can be too long, no care too great.

Hear all, weigh all with caution. Now, gentlemen, it is not your business to unravel the mystery. You are not here to find out the solution of that problem. You are not here to find out the murderer. You are not here to pursue anything else. You are simply and solely here to say, is this woman defendant guilty? That is all, and though the real criminal shall never be found, better a million times that than you find a verdict against this woman upon insufficient evidence and against your human experience and contrary to the law, so that an unhealthy appetite may be satisfied, and blood be given that belongs to the owner of it beyond anybody’s taking. Not who is it? Not how could it have been done? Did she do it? That is all. Reflect if you have not yet been able to bring that evidence with a certainty and a reasonable construction to a conclusion, so that you, as decent gentlemen, can go to your homes and sit down and say, “We have done our whole duty. We have brought in a verdict against her,” although perhaps, within a week we wish we had not, when we think of it. Nor must you think for a moment that this defendant is set to the business of finding out who did it. If she cannot find out and tell you who perpetrated these acts, somebody says, “Go hang her.” She is not a detective, and the commonwealth has put her in a place for the last ten months so she could not be very vigilant or active if she had all the ability in the world. She has been in jail in this county; she has been under control of the police from the very time, from Thursday, August 4, as you know from all these facts, and do not expect her to do things that are impossible. Pray, do not load upon her the responsibility of setting her to go when she cannot go, or do what she cannot do, or else hold her to account for it with the severest penalty known in the law. The commonwealth does not want any victim, either. In the old days they had sacrifices of lambs and goats, and even human beings were offered in expiation and in sacrifice. But we have got over all that. We do not even burn witches now in Massachusetts. The commonwealth wants no victim, and so, gentlemen, I have attempted in this way to array before you what I consider, in my own manner, the duties that lie upon you and the limitations under which you act. And what is the call upon you? Why, simply to be true to yourselves. “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” Now there always goes with any person the presumption of innocence of crime. I stand here at this moment addressing you, and I am clad all over with that presumption of innocence of every crime; so is each one of you. That is your bulwark; that is born with you, nay, rather is given to you out of the great consent of all the people, and you say “guilty?” Why I think not. I am innocent, and the court will tell you that that presumption started with this prisoner on August 4, and has been with her by night and by day. When you had her in charge that presumption of innocence has been in her favor and it never leaves her until by the verdict of a jury that presumption is overcome and she is declared guilty.

It is true that people who have heretofore been innocent commit crime, and so the law says, “We will not demand the unreasonable and impossible thing, but you, the defendant, shall have that presumption go with you until it is entirely overturned and it says that you are of a criminal heart and criminal act.” Now, bear that in mind, if it comes to any question in the discussion of the evidence of a doubtful consideration, then that presumption is all the time in the scale. The beam of the scale does not stand level to start with. We say the scales of justice hang even, but there is always with the defendant the presumption of innocence that tips the scale in her favor, and the commonwealth must begin and load in on the other side facts until they shall overcome the presumption—nay, more, and overbalance the facts that the defendant shall produce.

I shall not attempt to talk to you at length about the different kinds of evidence, direct evidence and circumstantial evidence. The learned court will explain those different features to you, and the lines have been drawn so clearly in the many cases that have been tried that it is wholly unnecessary for me to take your time and your patience. You know, or will know, when his honor has uttered to you the charge in the best way what we mean by direct evidence, and what we mean by circumstantial evidence. Direct evidence, testimony from actual observation and actual knowledge, is what we very frequently rely upon. But that is not always certain. I am bound to say to you, not always sure, because the man who gives the direct evidence may be a miserable liar and you would not believe him under oath unless you kept your hand on him. Now, that is direct evidence and then sometimes facts are found out by circumstances. You reason from hearing a noise or from seeing a person in a given place. You see a man going somewhere and you say he has gone in there for that particular business there, whether it is banking or insurance or grocery. Well, you may be right or you may be wrong. You have been given different circumstances to try to draw out a reasonable conclusion, but I am not going to enlarge upon that because I deem it unnecessary and because I have other things in my mind which are more important. You do not start in here to try to convict anybody—other people may, but you do not. If you are asked to convict upon any evidence, whether that is direct or circumstantial, you will, of course, bring it your clearest perception and strict honesty, and look to see whether it fits in, whether it is all right, and whether it has not run against this corner and also knocked itself to pieces, whether the circumstances are all in and whether something has not been left out, whether the chain is not broken with which it is sought to bind the defendant. Look it over, search it through and through, as I will in the argument as I proceed, and discover whether there is any claim that is insufficiently proved. Then, too, the court will tell you that by whichever method you proceed as to this defendant, the proof must come up in your mind as a moral certainty—not a mathematical certainty, but a moral certainty. It must be beyond a reasonable doubt.

Now, you saw in criminal cases before—very likely you have had a man before you on trial who had stolen five dollars or something of that kind, and the same rule applies. And you are told that you must not convict him unless you are satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt. It is not different in this case. In the one case you are perhaps dealing with a man who will be subjected to a penalty of a fine, or a brief imprisonment at the most. Here the same rule applies, and you are dealing with a woman, whose life is at stake, and nothing else. Now, you will see that while the rule of law is the same in the one case as in the other, the magnitude of a mistake about it is not to be lightly considered. So that when you are asked to find these essential facts beyond a reasonable doubt of a curmudgeon who sits off in a corner and says, “I won’t talk with anybody; I am an ugly fellow: I will make myself disagreeable in this jury room,” that is not it. That is not a reasonable doubt, no matter which side he is on. He is not fit for service in the jury room. It is the doubt of such men as I take you to be, with your home influences, with your church belongings, with your business associations, with your social relations, with all that binds you up to each of us.

It is the reasonable doubt of a reasonable man, confronted with the greatest crisis he has ever met in the world. Yes, the greatest crisis; because, though I doubt not some of you have worn the blue and faced the cannon shot, though you may have heard and felt the thunders of war, and you may have seen blood flow in streams, yet that is one thing; this—to sit here and to have in charge this young woman and to say upon your oaths you are satisfied that she is guilty or not guilty, is a duty to which very likely none of you have ever been called, and which probably you will never be asked to perform again. You will go to your graves thinking of how you performed this task, and it ought not to be that you can have any compunctions that you made a mistake which nobody could retrieve. Then again, under the laws of this State, the defendant in a criminal case is permitted to testify upon the stand as she desires to, but if she does not desire to she can refrain from testifying, and then the statute says, specifically and directly, no inference shall be drawn against her from the fact that she has not testified. And so the learned district attorney in his closing argument will not by the slightest suggestion or insinuation insult this court and jury by intimating that the defendant ought to have testified. That law was born under two considerations. Formerly the defendant could not testify. Later it seemed to be wise to give a defendant an opportunity to testify, but it says at once, although he does not come to the stand, you shall not take that against him in any way. And again, too, as if in the charity of human nature our law givers felt that it was too great a strain oftentimes to put upon a defendant to place him in such a position that he must either go upon the stand or have that argument laid against him, that he ought to have done it, the law which I have cited to you—not in its exact term, but in its essential features and expressions—was framed in the way I have stated. And I dismiss that again. The court will tell you in emphatic and clear language, and it will look you in the eye, and touching your sense of justice, say to you: Gentlemen, you must not consider that, and you will not as you go to yonder room under your oath depart from that, because if you do so what is the use in having scales for justice to hold or courts for the apparent administration of it either. Now I said you must leave out rumors, reports, statements which you have heard before the trial commenced. That is true. I repeat it; but more, you must leave out of your minds absolutely every single thing that the learned gentleman who opened this case, Mr. Moody, said that he was going to prove, unless he has actually proven it. Now I would not like to say that about him in private affairs. I would not be pleased to intimate to you that he would say anything that he was not going to do, because he is the soul of honor. But he speaks for the commonwealth, that is all, and the commonwealth tells him: “You must not say anything but what you are going to do and you must tell them that and that only.” And I shall expect the learned district attorney to withdraw the things that brother Moody said he was going to prove, because he has not proved them. The court room ought not to echo still with the utterances of the gentleman who opened this case, because they tend to create a prejudice against the defendant. Now let us tell you about that so that you will understand it. Mr. Moody said that the government was going to claim and prove that this defendant was preparing a dangerous weapon on August 3, the day before the murder. You heard him say that. I did. He said it. They have not proved it, have they? Was there a thing about it in the evidence? You have heard some discussion that we have had at the bar because, in order that there should be no prejudice, you have been asked to stop. Many of those things which have been offered in good faith have not been proved, because the court has said that they are not proper to be proved in this case. They have nothing to do with it. They will only mislead the jury, and the jury shall not hear them in this case. Whenever another case arises, if these things are pertinent and proper they shall be heard, but not now. No, the commonwealth came with the idea of putting these things before you, I say, with good intention, but the court says, “No, though your intention is good, it is not proper, and we will not complicate this thing. It will create a bias against the prisoner which may divert the course of justice, and that shall not be introduced here: it has no right here though you mean to be right.” Now, there is no proof at all, gentlemen, about any dangerous weapon having been prepared upon the 3d of August. And to make it more specific, Mr. Moody said in his opening that they would prove that this young woman went out to buy a poison on August 3. You have not heard any such evidence. It is not proved: the court did not allow it to be proved, and it is not in the case. Now you will not go to the jury room with the thought that if it had been allowed you would have considered that it was proven. But it is not allowed: no such evidence came before you, and I shall expect the district attorney, man fashion, to get up and say so, and I think you will, and I shall be disappointed in him if he does not. He will tell you that upon that subject, and that the case is not touched at all. Then he said that they were going to show you that the defendant had contradicted herself under oath about these occurrences. Well, there is another question which went to the court, and the court said: “That is not proper in this case. You cannot show that.” And so there is nothing of the kind. Now, are you not going to sit back there and say, “Well, I rather think Mr. Knowlton and Mr. Moody would not have offered it unless there is something behind it.” That is not the way to try cases. That is not the way you hold this defendant in charge. You might just as well have got your verdict before you started, and said, “Guilty, because she is here.” You might as well say, “We don’t want to hear any evidence.” You do not want to say that you do not care whether you hang her right or wrong,—“give us somebody.” Now, the court sits here to guard you and all of us against any such mistake. That will not do. The court says: “Here, gentlemen, decide this case on the evidence given right here from the witness stand and on nothing else.” When you stand there in the box ready to answer, and somebody says to you, “O, don’t mind what they put in about particular evidence, whether competent or incompetent,” you say, “No, I want my rights. I am here under the protection of the law, and I call upon these twelve men, decent men, under their oaths, to stand by me and see that I am not wronged.” So you will leave those things out, gentlemen. No prussic acid, no preparation of a weapon by this woman, no statement made by her under oath in this trial, or anywhere that you know anything about or have a right to consider—I do not care what you have read. Now, we shall agree in the consideration of this case very largely upon many things. My position in this case, in speaking for the defendant, is not to misrepresent or distort facts, but to take the proofs as they are, put them against each other and find out what is right. This defendant wants nothing but justice, and she desires to have it in the proper administration of the law. Things that are not in dispute I hope I shall not contest. I hope I shall array before you the facts altogether in an intelligent and clear way, and then ask you to give me your judgment on them by and by, and I just as sincerely trust that I will not, even by a single letter, step over the line of the proof or deal unjustly, even with the commonwealth that is really so dear to us all. Now, let us see if we cannot get at these things in a fair way without prejudice.

Mr. Andrew J. Borden left his house and went down street that morning, Thursday, August 4, about 9:30 o’clock, so that he arrived at the Savings Bank, upon the evidence, about 9:30. He went into several places along the street, not material now to consider, walked back along South Main street toward his house, stopped at a store of his that was being repaired, talked with Shortsleeves and Mr. Mather, and after picking up an old block, which he wrapped up in paper and took home, he started to go to his house. You recollect something was said that it is not material to consider in this connection, but he walked along up toward his house, arriving there, the defendant thinks, about 10:45. It did not vary, probably, more than two, or possibly three minutes from that time. It must have been as much as that because you recollect how Mr. Mather put it, his looking at the clock and the time that Mr. Borden lingered at the store, went upstairs, came down, went out into the middle of the street, went back and talked with Mather and Shortsleeves a minute or two and then went on. It was 10:40, twenty minutes of 11, as he came up to the store. Now he probably consumed two or three or four minutes in doing those things that they have spoken of, and so you may well, perhaps, infer that he reached his house about 10:45. We have learned of several things that he did, that he came into the house, sat down, went upstairs to his room, laid down his little package, and so on, was occupied with a few things that would consume a short space of time, so that we can say that he was murdered somewhere within a given fifteen or twenty minutes of time which may be between five minutes of 11 and ten minutes past 11. I presume that the commonwealth will not differ with me about this. At any rate, if there is a clearer statement of it to be made, the defendant has no objection if it lies within the proofs. That is the way I propose to argue, to take that as a fact. Mrs. Borden had died earlier. On the testimony of the physicians, inspecting the character of the wounds, the condition of the blood, the state of the stomachs and the intestines, they put it from an hour to an hour and a half earlier than he died. That is probably correct. At any rate, no issue is made about it; and so, if I may be permitted to state it, she would seem to have died between 9:45 o’clock and 10:15, somewhere within that half hour, taking all the evidence into account. That answers the demands of the physicians, and seems to me, if I may be permitted to say it, to accord to the facts. Now you have those tragedies within that short space of time in that place, and it is for us to see whether the defendant is connected with them: whether the defendant alone or the defendant with any confederate, if there is any proof about it, did the deed. I am at a loss to know where there is any evidence about any accomplice or anybody else connected with it at all, and so it is only my inquiry to find out if there is any truth as to this defendant. Of course, I need only suggest to you that until there is some sort of evidence that connects somebody with it, it is not well to assume that she must have had somebody, because you cannot think of anything else. That is not the way to try this case. Now it will be my endeavor in discussion of these questions to be very guarded about giving my opinion of the evidence. I have no right to put in whatever personal weight I may have in my construction of the evidence. That is bad practice, and I should expect, if I get over the line, for the learned court to call me to order, because I trust I know my place.

I have no right to tell you that I believe so and so about this case. I may believe all I want to, but my duty is to keep it inside of me, that is all. And so the district attorney will do the same: carrying his great weight and the strength of his convictions every way into this case, he is not so to demean himself as to tell you that he believes so and so. You do not want our beliefs, we want yours and your judgment. Now there sits the defendant. In yonder city were the crimes. Those crimes were the foulest and the darkest kind. She comes here under this presumption of innocence. It must be overcome absolutely and you must bind her up to the acts before you can say she is guilty. What is the cord that holds her to those terrible criminal acts? Let us see where it is to be found. It is not in the charge that is read in the indictment; it is not in the procedure of the court, but it must be in that chain of circumstances or in that line of direct proof that shall show you that she is tied up to this thing, that she is the one, and that it is not reasonable that anybody else did it or could have done it; that there is no reasonable way of accounting for the things that are proved except that she did it. That is the kind of bond that you must frame in order to hold her or to permit you even to think of holding her.

If a person commits a murder like this and we know it, we have no occasion to inquire for what reason he did it. If he did it then it does not make any difference whether he had any motive or not. He might have done it for pure deviltry, without a motive. He may have done it in insanity, and then the law comes in, in another way, to intervene in his behalf. But if it is proved—proved, I say, not guessed, but proved—that he did it, it is not of the slightest importance whether he had a motive or not. If he did it, that is all there is about it. Now, why is the commonwealth bound in this case to attempt to show a motive for doing? merely this, gentlemen, because they say here are the crimes—there are the crimes, there sits the defendant, you see her over there? Now, in order to hold her responsible for the crimes we have got to bind her up to the crimes. We have no direct evidence that puts her there, we have some circumstances that look as if she might get there: and so in order to bring her to it, we must show a reason why she would do it. What moved her to do it, that is the motive, that is to say the motive in this case, is only to explain the evidence. You get my idea I think. It is only to tell you how you can explain her acts or her words. If you can explain them in a reasonable and honorable way she is entitled to that. But if they cannot explain except that you find a criminal thought running through them, then that motive operates against her. Not to make her commit the crime, but to show you that what is said about it is a reasonable construction, that she was led to do it. That is it, if I understand the case properly, and I state it just as I believe it to be—the court will correct me if I am wrong—and I believe I state it about as the commonwealth attorneys would state it, intentionally I do; and so that motive is only to be inquired into to help out about the circumstances, and I think I can explain it to you—and I am guarding myself against saying anything I ought not to. Suppose the crime were committed in another place, and a man was suspected of it, and he proved that he were in the state of Georgia at the time, at the very instant, and everybody knew it. Well, now, you could not bind him for doing the crime anyway, no matter if he stood down there and swore profanely that if he could only get home he would have killed that man. That would not be anything, because the circumstances do not come up to it, they are not connected. So you do not want his motive to explain his acts. He hasn’t any acts to explain. Now, the government says that Miss Lizzie Borden has some acts to explain, therefore they will find out whether there is anything in her motives that will put a color on it. I think you see that, and they are inseparable from the conditions. Now, I say that the argument will be only this, that you are to look at the motive to see what effect you shall give to the evidence. It will not do to say that no adequate motive is shown and none is necessary. That is true when the crime is proved. That is true when you have the facts. But that is not true when you are trying to show the motive in order to explain the facts. Now there is absolutely (and I think the commonwealth will say it) no direct evidence against Miss Borden, the defendant. You know what I mean. Nobody saw or heard anything or experienced anything that connects her with the tragedies. No weapon whatever, and no knowledge of the use of one, as to her, has been shown. You know if you had found her with some weapon of that kind in her control, or in her room, or with her belongings, that would be direct evidence. But there is nothing of that kind. It is not claimed. It is not shown that she ever used an implement of the character that must have produced these murders. It is not shown that she ever touched one, or knew of one, or bought one, or had one. In fact, the evidence is that she did not know where the ordinary things in the house of that kind were.