How can he he so wrong, and yet so convincing, Conway wondered. Can’t they realize that if it had been that way, I could have divorced her? I wouldn’t have had to kill her. He found himself looking at the entire proceedings in a detached fashion, rather like a critic watching a somewhat implausible play. He still found it hard to believe that he could be convicted of a crime, even though he had committed it, on such a web of utterly false and circumstantial evidence.
“... I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, to remember one further thing. The murdered woman is not on trial here. If she took money from their bank account which was not all hers, there are laws covering theft, and this defendant could have found redress in the courts. If her conduct with Taylor was not above reproach, there are laws which provide for divorce. Instead of invoking the law, this man murdered her, and there are laws covering that, too. Your duty is to see that this man pays the penalty the law provides for murder.”
The jury was back in less than two hours with its verdict. Guilty. Murder in the First Degree. Without recommendations.
After his appeal had been denied he received a note, unsigned, but postmarked Topeka. “I wish you’d believed me,” it read, “because I’m going to go on loving you all my life.” But he told himself that the message was intended to convey more solace than truth; that it could not be an accurate prophecy.
But until the end — which came shortly after he entered the gas chamber at San Quentin — Conway vowed that he was the victim of the foulest miscarriage of justice in the history of California. And, in a sense, he was.
Was, that is, if you view justice as a sort of game, played strictly according to rules, with the method, and not the ultimate result, the important thing. If, on the other hand, you string along with the dictionary definition, then Conway received no more nor less than justice, for he was rendered what was his due. So, in a sense, justice was served, too.