“God forbid! Not a hair of his head shall fall to the ground, for he walked with God on that day.
“I now with all solemnity leave in your hands the fate of Harry K. Thaw.”
CHAPTER XXIII.
“Thou Shalt Not Kill”—Jerome.
PROSECUTOR IN TERRIFIC DENUNCIATION OF HARRY THAW AS A COLD-BLOODED MURDERER—ATTACKS CHARACTER OF EVELYN, THE “ANGEL CHILD WHO WAS ALWAYS READY TO GO TO THE HUMAN OGRE” WHOM THAW KILLED—SNEERS AT THE YOUNG WIFE—WARNS JURY AGAINST “DEMENTIA AMERICANA,” PLEA—“NOTHING TO SHOW DEFENDANT WAS INSANE; EVERYTHING TO SHOW HE WAS SANE.
In his supreme effort to send Harry Thaw to the electric chair, District Attorney Jerome in his closing speech savagely lashed the defendant as a deliberate, cold-blooded murderer. He bitterly attacked the characters of Thaw and his wife, referring to Evelyn as “the angel child,” who was “always ready to go to the human ogre who stripped her of her virtue,” and declared her story of her ruin by White was absolutely false.
Mr. Jerome lost no opportunity to sneer at the little wife’s tragic story and at the chivalry of her husband, and he paid his respects to Delmas’ sensational “Dementia Americana,” or unwritten law plea, by asking if it was the higher law under which a man may flaunt the woman through the capitals of Europe for two years as his mistress—and then kill.
The prosecutor warned the jury that it would be a violation of their oaths to consider “Dementia Americana,” declaring it had no status on the Atlantic seaboard.
Mr. Jerome said: “This is simply a common, vulgar, everyday, tenderloin homicide.” He denounced the plea of Attorney Delmas as “an appeal to the passions.” There could, he said, be but one of four verdicts—murder in the first degree, murder in the second degree, manslaughter, or “not guilty because of insanity.”
The prosecutor also made a stirring appeal in behalf of the slain architect, declaring that he had been villainously maligned. Mr. Jerome said it seemed to him that the voice of the murdered Stanford White was crying out to him, “Can’t you say one word for me? Must I go down to the fires of hell unheard—undefended.”