Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 01.pdf/292

Rh learning outside the limits of the legal profession, have arranged and classified the methods of solving the commission of a crime and the identity of its perpetrator. Greatest, perhaps, among these was Jeremy Bentham, whose "Rationale of Judicial Evidence" is an admirable analysis of this species of proof. Those crimes which are committed "far from any human eye, ear, or dwelling-place in the darkness of the night, in the solitude of the forest or ocean, or in the misty recesses of the impenetrable past," must be discovered and brought home by the proof of a chain of facts, the conclusion from which is irresistible,—a conclusion to which every discovered fact must point, and with which every such fact must be consistent. According to Bentham, every crime witnessed must include some or all of the following circumstances, and no others: they must be proved by reference to a disposition or character of the accused indicating a motive, to preparations for the crime, to opportunities to commit it, to instruments for the work, to the violation of some person or thing, to the possession of the fruits of the crime, to the concealment of it, to fear of discovery, and, finally, to confessions made of its commission. It is our purpose to narrate some of the more remarkable cases which have occupied the attention of justice, and wherein circumstantial evidence has been employed to secure conviction. Some show the errors into which justice may fall in following the path indicated by this kind of proof; others demonstrate the overwhelming force with which a single thread of circumstantial evidence sometimes crushes an accused person otherwise shielded, by his own cunning or by fortunate accidents, from the detection of his deed. Of the former sort was a case of mistaken identity which occurred many years ago in Paris. It may here be said that the failures of justice have often resulted from a fatal mistake in persons. An old woman kept a small shop in a square on the left side of the Seine. It was generally thought that she had hoarded considerable money in the course of her trade. She lived in a room back of the shop, quite alone; but she employed a boy who lived in the fourth story of the building where the shop was. This boy kept the key of the shop, which he regularly locked every night. One morning the shop door was observed to be open before the customary hour. The curious neighbors peered in; seeing nobody stirring, they finally penetrated to the old woman's bedroom. There they found her, lying dead in her bed. She had been stabbed several times, and a bloody knife lay on the floor in the shop. This knife, it was easily proved, belonged to the hired boy. Not only that: in one of the dead woman's hands was clasped a lock of hair, and in the other a necktie. The necktie was fully proved to belong also to the boy; the hair, so far as could be judged, was exactly like his. It was found, moreover, that the front door had not been broken open, but quietly unlocked. Now the boy, and he alone, so far as anybody knew, had a key which fitted the lock. On being arrested, this boy, when confronted with the proofs, confessed the crime. He suffered the penalty of death. Not long after, a boy who was employed in a neighboring shop fell ill. Being told that he was on his death-bed, he declared that he had murdered the old woman for her money. He had been in the habit of dressing the hair of the boy who was executed; had collected locks of it as he had an opportunity; had put the hair and the cravat into the dead woman's hands; had taken a wax impression of the lock, and thus procured another key; and having got possession of the other boy's knife, had with it inflicted the fatal wounds. In this case there seems, indeed, to have been a complete chain of circumstantial evidence, sufficient to identify the hired boy as the assassin. Motive was present in the boy's supposition that his mistress had hoarded money. Opportunity was present in the fact that he held the key of the shop. An instrument belonging to him, which had