The Black Mask — page 14: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

12 The Prisoner Speaks to preserve, between discrediting the testimony and discrediting the witness. I shall allow their testimony to stand without other question than that with which I challenge the entirety of the in- dictment against me. “You will have noticed also, since your attention has been called to it by the learned counsellor for the State, that I took no exceptions, in either the technical legal sense or the literal, to anything that was said by any of these witnesses, or by the prosecuting attor- ney. Statements have been made in the guise of evidence that I do not think are admissible according to legal pro- cedure. But I do not care to argue that point, or take any advantage of it. The truth’shall prevail. I have no intention or desire to appeal this case to a higher court, either State or Federal. If you find me guilty as tharged, the only court to which I shall carry my appeal is that Higher One, before which we all _ must appear sooner or later to answer for our conduct here below. “T have, in fact, no longer any in- centive to live or cling to this existence. Merely to die would be a welcome re- lease from the abyss of sorrow in which I am steeped. My wife made life a joy and a blessing. Without her to share it, the balance is of neither worth nor moment. But, for her sake rather than for my own, IJ; am not content to go hence by a shameful route and branded as a criminal. “Before that Higher Court I shall have no fear of a possible verdict of guilty, for there only the truth shall be known. I am not afraid of the truth. Nor am I afraid of that same truth in this Court, but only of its being un- discovered or misunderstood. “I cannot know what impression has been made upon your minds by the testimony to which you have listened. Being men of common sense and actu- ated by emotions common to all of us, I cannot see how, at this time, you can be anything but most violently preju- diced against me, Everything, so far, has been conceived, planned and pre- sented with the sole idea of creating such a prejudice in your minds, “Understand me clearly—I am not criticizing or blaming the prosecuting attorney for anything he has done or said here in this courtroom. Both you and I must presume that he is an hon- orable man, and performing his sworn duty as he sees that duty. We have heard no word or evidence to the con- trary. He, we should have every rea- son to suppose, honestly and imparti- ally believes me guilty of the crime of murder as charged, If that were not so he could not, as an upright man and a trusted officer of the law, have brought that charge against me. If he did not so believe in my guilt ‘to the exclusion of every other reasonable hypothesis’ any reputable attorney, any decent man, would have refused to conduct this case on behalf, and in the name, of the people whose public servant he is. “T have, as I said, been placed before you in the most unfavorable light pos- sible. I have been made to appear as a being less than human and more brutish than the brutes. I have been painted in colors that would make a wolf blush and a hyena hide his head in shame, that would cause a snake to shun my society and a tiger to shudder at my ferocity. “Yet I not only hope, I expect to change all this, to remove this preju- dice now in your minds, to wash away this stain that reveals me in such loath- some guise. I intend to convince you of my innocence and show you that I have been most abominably and cruelly misjudged and misnamed—whether by accident or design remains to be seen. And I shall do this, not by an array of witnesses in rebuttal of those who al- ready have appeared upon the stand,