“I offer for your consideration, an instance of the fallibility of merely bare, unsupported denial of guilt on the part of the accused.  A priest at Lauterbach was suspected, arrested and tried for the murder of a woman, under very aggravated circumstances.  He was subjected to eighty examinations; and each time solemnly denied the crime.  Even when confronted at midnight with the skull of the victim murdered eight years before, he vehemently protested his innocence; called on the skull to declare him not the assassin, and appealed to the Holy Trinity to proclaim his innocence.  Finally he confessed his crime; testified that while cutting the throat of his victim, he had exhorted her to repentance, had given her absolution, and that having concealed the corpse, he had said masses for her soul.

“The forlorn and hopeless condition of the prisoner at this bar, appeals pathetically to that compassion which we are taught to believe coexists with justice, even in the omnipotent God we worship; yet in the face of incontrovertible facts elicited from reliable witnesses, of coincidences which no theory of accident can explain, can we stifle convictions, solely because she pleads ’not guilty’?  Pertinent, indeed, was the ringing cry of that ancient prosecutor:  ’Most illustrious Caesar! if denial of guilt be sufficient defence, who would ever be convicted?’ You have been assured that inferences drawn from probable facts eclipse the stupendous falsehood of Ananias and Sapphira!  Then the same family strain inevitably crops out, in the loosely-woven web of defensive presumptive evidence—­whose pedigree we trace to the same parentage.  God forbid that I should commit the sacrilege of arrogating His divine attribute—­infallibility—­for any human authority, however exalted; or claim it for any amount of proof, presumptive or positive.  ’It is because humanity even when most cautious and discriminating is so mournfully fallible and prone to error, that in judging its own frailty, we require the aid and reverently invoke the guidance of Jehovah.’  In your solemn deliberations bear in mind this epitome of an opinion, entitled to more than a passing consideration:  ’Perhaps strong circumstantial evidence in cases of crime, committed for the most part in secret, is the most satisfactory of any from whence to draw the conclusion of guilt; for men may be seduced to perjury, by many base motives; but it can scarcely happen that many circumstances, especially if they be such over which the accuser could have no control, forming altogether the links of a transaction, should all unfortunately concur to fix the presumption of guilt on an individual, and yet such a conclusion be erroneous.’