nothing to do with a later practical life. ‘Judge not, lest ye be
judged and with whatsoever measure ye mete, it will be
measured unto ye again.’
“We admit the existence and charm and potent love spell of
the mysterious Miss X and her letters, which we have not
been able to introduce here, and their effect on this
defendant. We admit his love for this Miss X, and we
propose to show by witnesses of our own, as well as by
analyzing some of the testimony that has been offered
here, that perhaps the sly and lecherous overtures with
which this defendant is supposed to have lured the lovely
soul now so sadly and yet so purely accidentally blotted out,
as we shall show, from the straight and narrow path of
morality, were perhaps no more sly nor lecherous than the
proceedings of any youth who finds the girl of his choice
surrounded by those who see life only in the terms of the
strictest and narrowest moral regime. And, gentlemen, as
your own county district attorney has told you, Roberta
Alden loved Clyde Griffiths. At the very opening of this
relationship which has since proved to be a tragedy, this
dead girl was deeply and irrevocably in love with him, just
as at the time he imagined that he was in love with her. And
people who are deeply and earnestly in love with each
other are not much concerned with the opinions of others in
regard to themselves. They are in love—and that is
sufficient!
“But, gentlemen, I am not going to dwell on that phase of
the question so much as on this explanation which we are
about to offer. Why did Clyde Griffiths go to Fonda, or to
Utica, or to Grass Lake, or to Big Bittern, at all? Do you
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think we have any reason for or any desire to deny or
discolor in any way the fact of his having done so, or with
Roberta Alden either? Or why, after the suddenness and
seeming strangeness and mystery of her death, he should
have chosen to walk away as he did? If you seriously think
so for one fraction of a moment, you are the most
hopelessly deluded and mistaken dozen jurymen it has
been our privilege to argue before in all our twenty-seven
years’ contact with juries.
“Gentlemen, I have said to you that Clyde Griffiths is not
guilty, and he is not. You may think, perhaps, that we
ourselves must be believing in his guilt. But you are wrong.
The peculiarity, the strangeness of life, is such that
oftentimes a man may be accused of something that he did
not do and yet every circumstance surrounding him at the
time seem to indicate that he did do it. There have been
many very pathetic and very terrible instances of
miscarriages of justice through circumstantial evidence
alone. Be sure! Oh, be very sure that no such mistaken
judgment based on any local or religious or moral theory of
conduct or bias, because of presumed irrefutable evidence,
is permitted to prejudice you, so that without meaning to,
and with the best and highest-minded intentions, you
yourselves see a crime, or the intention to commit a crime,
when no such crime or any such intention ever truly or
legally existed or lodged in the mind or acts of this
defendant. Oh, be sure! Be very, very sure!”
And here he paused to rest and seemed to give himself
over to deep and even melancholy thought, while Clyde,
heartened by this shrewd and defiant beginning was
inclined to take more courage. But now Belknap was talking
again, and he must listen—not lose a word of all this that
was so heartening.
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“When Roberta Alden’s body was taken out of the water at
Big Bittern, gentlemen, it was examined by a physician. He
declared at the time that the girl had been drowned. He will
be here and testify and the defendant shall have the benefit
of that testimony, and you must render it to him.
“You were told by the district attorney that Roberta Alden
and Clyde Griffiths were engaged to be married and that
she left her home at Biltz and went forth with him on July
sixth last on her wedding journey. Now, gentlemen, it is so
easy to slightly distort a certain set of circumstances. ‘Were
engaged to be married’ was how the district attorney
emphasized the incidents leading up to the departure on
July sixth. As a matter of fact, not one iota of any direct
evidence exists which shows that Clyde Griffiths was ever
formally engaged to Roberta Alden, or that, except for some
passages in her letters, he agreed to marry her. And those
passages, gentlemen, plainly indicate that it was only under
the stress of moral and material worry, due to her condition
—for which he was responsible, of course, but which,
nevertheless, was with the consent of both—a boy of
twenty-one and a girl of twenty-three—that he agreed to
marry her. Is that, I ask you, an open and proper
engagement—the kind of an engagement you think of
when you think of one at all? Mind you, I am not seeking to
flout or belittle or reflect in any way on this poor, dead girl. I
am simply stating, as a matter of fact and of law, that this
boy was not formally engaged to this dead girl. He had not
given her his word beforehand that he would marry her …
Never! There is no proof. You must give him the benefit of
that. And only because of her condition, for which we admit
he was responsible, he came forward with an agreement to
marry her, in case … in case” (and here he paused and
rested on the phrase), “she was not willing to release him.
And since she was not willing to release him, as her various
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letters read here show, that agreement, on pain of a public
exposure in Lycurgus, becomes, in the eyes and words of
the district attorney, an engagement, and not only that but a
sacred engagement which no one but a scoundrel and a
thief and a murderer would attempt to sever! But,
gentlemen, many engagements, more open and sacred in
the eyes of the law and of religion, have been broken.
Thousands of men and thousands of women have seen
their hearts change, their vows and faith and trust flouted,
and have even carried their wounds into the secret places
of their souls, or gone forth, and gladly, to death at their
own hands because of them. As the district attorney said in
his address, it is not new and it will never be old. Never!
“But it is such a case as this last, I warn you, that you are
now contemplating and are about to pass upon—a girl who
is the victim of such a change of mood. But that is not a
legal, however great a moral or social crime it may be. And
it is only a curious and almost unbelievably tight and yet
utterly misleading set of circumstances in connection with
the death of this girl that chances to bring this defendant
before you at this time. I swear it. I truly know it to be so.
And it can and will be fully explained to your entire
satisfaction before this case is closed.
“However, in connection with this last statement, there is
another which must be made as a preface to all that is to
follow.
“Gentlemen of the jury, the individual who is on trial here for
his life is a mental as well as a moral coward—no more and
no less—not a downright, hardhearted criminal by any
means. Not unlike many men in critical situations, he is a
victim of a mental and moral fear complex. Why, no one as
yet has been quite able to explain. We all have one secret
bugbear or fear. And it is these two qualities, and no others,
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that have placed him in the dangerous position in which he
now finds himself. It was cowardice, gentlemen—fear of a
rule of the factory of which his uncle is the owner, as well as
fear of his own word given to the officials above him, that
caused him first to conceal the fact that he was interested
in the pretty country girl who had come to work for him. And
later, to conceal the fact that he was going with her.
“Yet no statutory crime of any kind there. You could not
possibly try a man for that, whatever privately you might
think. And it was cowardice, mental and moral, gentlemen,
which prevented him, after he became convinced that he
could no longer endure a relationship which had once
seemed so beautiful, from saying outright that he could not,
and would not continue with her, let alone marry her. Yet,