Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 05.pdf/362



CURRENT TOPICS. THE LIZZIE BORDEN CASE. — Lizzie Borden was tried last month for the murder of her parents, and just as every lawyer in the country expected, was acquitted in short order. As the case went to the jury there was absolutely nothing against her. The trial was simply a police miscarriage. The people's case was a tissue of improbabilities, — we do not think it too strong to say impossibilities. Here was a murder of two persons, in the most bloody and un necessarily cruel manner, — hacking with a hatchet even after death; a crime evidently the work of a lunatic or of a desperate and hardened criminal. In stead of looking for such a person, the police seize upon the daughter, a mature young woman, well educated, refined, travelled, Christian, with property of her own, with no adequate motive, on loving terms with the father, and on civil terms with the step mother, and try to convince themselves, the public, and a jury that she hacked her step-mother to death, in broad daylight, in her own house, at an hour when she might easily have been interrupted, then changed or washed her dress and re-arranged her hair, met her father calmly an hour or so later and killed him in the same manner, and repeated her toilet! The mere statement is enough to defeat belief. Not a spot of blood was found on her nor on any article of her dress; not a weapon was discovered to answer for the wounds. She was self-possessed and calm, though exhibiting great sorrow and horror. The ex treme weakness of the case is illustrated by the State's theory that she stripped herself naked to do these horrid deeds! Here then was a Jack-the-Ripper crime, and the police instead of scouring the country for a tiger pounced on a harmless house cat, simply because she was in and out of the dwelling, and they could not see who else could have done it! In the entire history of police stupidity there is nothing to compare with this, and we are sorry to feel obliged to add, nothing to surpass the wickedness and bloodthirstiness with which the young woman was followed up and conspired against in order to save the police from defeat and ridicule. The incident of the prison matron's testimony demonstrated that. But Lizzie was not only acquitted, but triumphantly cleared, in our judgment, of even the slightest suspicion that may

temporarily have arisen against her. The terrible injustice done her should teach people that it is not essential to make a victim where none apparently exists, and that citizens are not to be hanged simply because people cannot imagine who else could have committed the crime. The case is not unprecedented. The murder of Mr. Nathan in New York was very similar, but his sons were not put on trial for it. There have been two (if not three) remarkable mur ders in Connecticut in recent years, and persons have been tried and acquitted in every case. We take pleas ure in adding our tribute of admiration of the skill dis played in Lizzie's defence. Greater wisdom, tact, acuteness, and sound sense were never displayed by a lawyer than by Governor Robinson, and these were supplemented by sympathy and humanity which do him honor as a man.

JANUS ON THE BENCH. — The court of chancery survives in Vermont, but it survives in a singular sort. The same officer sits as chancellor and as common law judge, and he deals out common law or equity according to the side from which he is ap proached. He therefore resembles the heathen god Janus, of the double face, or Mr. Facing-both-ways, in the •• Pilgrim's Progress." By an appeal to his bet ter self he can mitigate the rigors of the common law by the application of the milder and more beneficent principles of equity. Like Mr. Orator Puff, he has "two tones in his voice." So, if he finds when ap proached on his common law face that he is bound to grant the demand of the plaintiff, but feels that it would be unjust and inequitable to do so, he may allow the defendant to prostrate himself beneath his equity face, and solicit him to restrain himself from pronouncing the dreaded judgment of his common law mouth. It is like praying the Deity to restrain his wrath, but with a more appreciable result. A Vermont lawyer, Hon. Joel C. Barker, of Rutland, thus describes this marvellous procedure : — "In Vermont, where the same man presides over the County Court and Court of Chancery in the same county we often have the judge saying from his high seat of honor and of justice to a suitor : ' The law compels me to decide this case in your favor, and to award you a sum in