Efforts for Release
The public are not probably fully aware how much intensity of feeling and earnest work has been expended on my case during the fourteen and one-half years of my imprisonment. The Home Office knows. Men in high positions in both political parties in England have often united in demanding a new trial. The almost invariable reply has been that the best means to effect my release was to obtain new facts or evidence, and submit these to the Home Secretary for his consideration. Those well-meaning advisers seemed to forget that the half million of petitioners for my reprieve or free pardon in England—not to count those in America—were not moved thereto by new facts or evidence, but by the absence of facts or evidence sufficient to prove that the alleged crime had been committed by any one, or that either guilt or complicity in that crime, if crime it were, attached to me. Surely it is not the business of the public nor of individual citizens to prove the innocence of any unhappy person whom process of law selects for punishment, while it is the business of every citizen to see that the courts incontestably prove the guilt of any person accused of a crime before sentence is passed, in the following manner:
1. It must be proved that a crime has been committed.
2. It must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused person is the one who committed it.