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By Root 20536 0

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.

“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 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