ARGUMENT OF WILLIAM M. EVARTS, ESQ., FOR THE PROSECUTION.
May it please your Honors, and Gentlemen of the Jury:
A trial in a Court of Justice is a trial of many things besides the prisoners at the bar. It is a trial of the strength of the laws, of the power of the Government, of the duty of the citizen, of the fidelity to conscience and the intelligence of the Jury. It is a trial of those great principles of faith, of duty, of law, of civil society, that distinguish the condition of civilization from that of barbarism. I know no better instance of the distinction between a civilized, instructed, Christian people, and a rude and barbarous nation, than that which is shown in the assertions of right where might and violence and the rage of passion in physical contest determine everything, and this last sober, discreet, patient, intelligent, authorized, faithful, scrupulous, conscientious investigation, under the lights of all that intelligence with which God has favored any of us; under that instruction which belongs to the learned and accredited expounders of the law of an established free Government; under the aid of, and yet not misled by, the genius or eloquence of advocates on either side.
But, after all, the controlling dominion of duty to the men before you in the persons of the prisoners, to the whole community around you, and to the great nation for which you now discharge here a vital function for its permanence and its safety,—your duty to the laws and the Government of your country (which, giving its protection, requires your allegiance, and finds its last and final resting-place, both here and in England, in the verdicts of Juries),—your duty to yourselves,—requires you to recognize yourselves not only as members of civil society, but as children of the "Father of an Infinite Majesty," and amenable to His last judgment for your acts. Can any of us, then, fail to feel, even more fully than we can express, that sympathies, affections, passions, sentiments, prejudices, hopes, fears, feelings and responsibilities of others than ourselves are banished at once and forever, as we enter the threshold of such an inquiry as this, and never return to us until we have passed from this sacred precinct, and, with our hands on our breasts and our eyes on the ground, can humbly hope that we have done our duty and our whole duty?
Something was said to you, gentlemen of the Jury, of the unwonted circumstances of the prosecution, by the learned counsel who, many days ago, and with an impressiveness that has not yet passed away from your memory, opened on behalf of the prisoners the course of this defence.
He has said to you that the number of those whose fate, for life or for death, hangs on your verdict, is equal to your own—hinting a ready suggestion that that divided responsibility by which twelve men may sometimes shelter themselves, in weighing in the balance the life of a single man, is not yours. Gentlemen, let us understand how much of force and effect there is in the suggestion, and how truly and to what extent the responsibility of a Jury may be said to include this issue of life and death. In the first place, as Jurymen, you have no share or responsibility in the wisdom or the justice of those laws which you are called upon to administer. If there be defects in them—if they have something of that force and severity which is necessary for the maintenance of Government and the protection of peace and property, and of life on the high seas—you have had no share in their enactment, and have no charge, at your hands, of their enforcement. In the next place, you have no responsibility of any kind in regard to the discretion of the representatives of this Government in the course which they choose to take, as to whether they will prosecute or leave unprosecuted. You do not, within the limits of the inquiry presented to you, dispose of the question, why others have not been presented to you; nor may that which has been done in a case not before you, serve as a guide for the subject submitted to your consideration. So, too, you have no responsibility of any kind concerning the course or views of the law which this tribunal may give for your guidance. The Court does not make the law, but Congress does. The Court declares the law as enacted by the Government, and the Jury find the facts—giving every scrutiny, every patient investigation, every favor for life, and every reasonable doubt as to the facts, to the prisoners. Having disposed of that duty, as sober, intelligent and faithful men, graduating your attention only by the gravity of the inquiry, you have no further responsibility. But I need not say to you, gentlemen, that if any civilized Government is to have control of the subject of piracy—if pirates are to be brought within the jurisdiction of the criminal law—the very nature of the crime involves the fact that its successful prosecution necessarily requires that considerable numbers shall be engaged in it. I am quite certain that, if my learned friends had found in the circumstances of this case nothing which removed it out of the category of the heinous crime of private plunder at sea, exposing property and life, and breaking up commerce, they would have found nothing in the fact that a ship's crew was brought in for trial, and that the number of that crew amounted to twelve men, that should be pressed to the disturbance of your serene judgment, in any disposition of the case. Now, gentlemen, let us look a little into the nature of the crime, and into the condition of the law.
The penalty of the crime of piracy or robbery at sea stands on our statute books heavier than the penalty assigned for a similar crime committed on land—which is, in fact, similar, so far as concerns its being an act of depredation. It may be said, and it is often argued, that, when the guilt of two offences is equal, society transcends its right and duty when it draws a distinction in its punishments; and it may be said, as has been fully argued to you—at least, by implication, in the course of this case—that the whole duty and the whole responsibility of civil Governments, in the administration of criminal law and the punishment of crime, has to do with retributive vengeance, as it were, on the moral guilt of the prisoner. Now, gentlemen, I need not say to you, who are experienced at least in the common inquiries concerning Governments and their duties, that, as a mere naked and separate consideration for punishing moral guilt, Government leaves, or should leave, vengeance where it belongs—to Him who searches the heart and punishes according to its secret intents—drawing no distinction between the wicked purpose which fully plans, and the final act which executes that purpose. The great, the main duty—the great, the main right—of civil society, in the exercise of its dominion over the liberties, lives, and property of its subjects, is the good of the public, in the prevention, the check, the discouragement, the suppression of crime. And I am sure that there is scarcely one of us who, if guilt, if fault, if vice could be left to the punishment of conscience and the responsibility of the last and great assize, without prejudice to society, without injury to the good of others, without, indeed, being a danger and a destruction to all the peace, the happiness, and the safety of communities, would not readily lay aside all his share in the vindictive punishments of guilty men. But society, framed in the form and for the purposes of Government, finds, alas! that this tribunal of conscience, and this last and future accountability of another world, is inadequate to its protection against wickedness and crime in this.
You will find, therefore, in all, even the most enlightened and most humane codes of laws, that some necessary attention is paid to the predominant interest which society has in preventing crime. The very great difficulty of detecting it, the circumstances of secrecy, and the chances of escape on the part of the criminal, are considerations which enter into the distribution of its penalties. You will find, in a highly commercial community, like that of England, and to some extent—although, I am glad to say, with much less severity—in our own, which is also a highly commercial community, that frauds against property, frauds against trade, frauds in the nature of counterfeiting and forgery, and all those peaceful and not violent but yet pernicious interferences with the health and necessary activity of our every-day life, require the infliction of severe penalties for what, when you take up the particular elements of the crime, seems to have but little of the force, and but little of the depth of a serious moral delinquency.
The severity of the penalties for passing counterfeit money are inflicted upon the poor and ignorant who, in so small a matter as a coin of slight value, knowingly and intelligently, under even the strongest impulses of poverty, are engaged in the offence. Now, therefore, when commercial nations have been brought to the consideration of what their enactments on the subject of piracy shall be, they have taken into account that the very offence itself requires that its commission should be outside of the active and efficient protection of civil society—that the commission of the crime involves, on the part of the criminals, a fixed, deliberate determination and preparation—and that the circumstances under which the victims, either in respect of their property or of their lives, are exposed to these aggressions, are such as to make it a part of the probable course of the crime, that the most serious evils and the deepest wounds may be inflicted. Now, when a crime, not condemned in ethics or humanity, and which the positive enactments of the law have made highly penal, yet contains within itself circumstances that appeal very strongly to whatever authority or magistrate has rightful control of the subject for a special exemption, and special remission, and special concession from the penalty of the law, where and upon what principles does a wise and just, a humane and benignant Government, dispose of that question? I agree that, if crimes which the good of society requires to be subjected to harsh penalties, must stand, always and irrevocably; upon the mere behest of judicial sentence, there would be found an oppression and a cruelty in some respects, that a community having a conscientious adherence to right and humanity would scarcely tolerate. Where, then, does it wisely bestow all the responsibility, and give all the power that belongs to this adjustment, according to the particular circumstances of the moral and personal guilt, which must be necessary, and is always conceded? Why, confessedly, to the pardoning power, alluded to on one side or the other—though chiefly on the part of the prisoners' counsel—in the course of this trial. Now, you will perceive, at once, what the difference is between a Court, or a Jury, or a public prosecuting officer, yielding to particular circumstances of actual or of general qualification of a crime charged,—so that the law shall be thwarted, and the certainty and directness of judicial trial and sentence be made the sport of sympathy, or of casual or personal influences,—and placing the pardoning power where it shall be governed by the particular circumstances of each case, so that its exercise shall have no influence in breaking down the authority of law, or in disturbing the certainty, directness, and completeness of judicial rules. For, it is the very nature of a pardon,—committed to the Chief Magistrate of the Federal Union in cases of which this Court has jurisdiction, and to the Chief Magistrate of every State in the Union in cases of which the State tribunals take cognizance,—that it is a recognition of the law, and of the sentence of the law, and leaves the laws undisturbed, the rules for the guidance of men unaffected, the power and strength of the Government unweakened, the force of the judiciary unparalyzed, and yet disposes of each case in a way that is just, or, if not just, is humane and clement, where the pardon is exercised.
Now, gentlemen, I shall say nothing more on the subject of pardon. It is a thing with which I have nothing to do—with which this learned Court has nothing to do—with which you, as Jurymen, have nothing to do—beyond the fact that this beneficent Government of ours has not omitted from its arrangement, in the administration of its penal laws, this divine attribute of mercy.