Here is the motive for the crime, clear as light. Are not
the bloody knife, the bloody dress, the bloody clothes of the
prisoner, unimpeachable witnesses to the criminal act? The
criminal agency of the prisoner has not the shadow of a possibility
to obscure it. His motive is gigantic. The blood on him, and his
despair when arrested, cry 'Murder! murder!' with a thousand
tongues.
"Men may lie, but circumstances cannot. The thousand hopes and
fears and passions of men may delude, or bias the witness. Yet it
is beyond the human mind to conceive that a clear, complete chain
of concatenated circumstances can be in error. Hence it is that
the greatest jurists have declared that such evidence, being rarely
liable to delusion or fraud, is safest and most powerful. The
machinery of human justice cannot guard against the remote and
improbable doubt. The inference is persistent in the affairs of
men. It is the only means by which the human mind reaches the
truth. If you forbid the jury to exercise it, you bid them work
after first striking off their hands. Rule out the irresistible
inference, and the end of justice is come in this land; and you may
as well leave the spider to weave his web through the abandoned
court room.
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