‘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 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.
“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 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.