At three o’clock in the morning the Dean of Faculty rose to address the jury on behalf of William Brodie.
The Dean of Faculty’s Address to the Jury.
Dean of Faculty
The Dean of Faculty—Gentlemen of the jury, the present trial exhibits in the person of William Brodie, in whose behalf I now address you, a singular phenomenon in the moral world: a man descended of an ancient and honourable family, left by a respectable father in opulent circumstances, and very far from indigence and temptation; educated in the manners and habits of a gentleman; bred to a reputable occupation, at the head of which he has frequently stood; and in virtue of that situation been a member of the Town Council of this great city; who, for a long series of years, has maintained an irreproachable character in society, and has often filled offices of honour and trust among his fellow-citizens, the duties of which he has discharged with attention and fidelity, standing at the bar of this High Court, accused of having leagued himself with the meanest and most abandoned of mankind, in the commission of a crime not less marked with moral depravity on the part of the perpetrators, than fraught with injury and danger to the public.
God forbid, gentlemen, that I were capable of wishing to press on your minds these circumstances in my client’s once honourable and happy situation, with a view of creating in your minds an undue bias in his favour. Though your discernment were not, as I know it is, sufficient to secure you against the effect of such considerations, my feelings as a man, and a sense of my professional duty, would not allow me to resort to such arguments in opposition to justice, which is no respecter of persons.
Yet, gentlemen, there is a view in which I am entitled to call your attention to the former situation and circumstances of this unfortunate gentleman; for unfortunate I must call him, be the result of the present trial life or death. In deciding on evidence in support of a criminal charge, the former character of the prisoner, his probable temptations to commit the offence with which he is charged, must ever be a material consideration. A poor, forlorn wretch, without fortune, without friends, without education, without occupation, is he who is naturalised to support himself by private or open depredation on the public; and when such a person is accused, the minds of a jury, though they must presume his innocence, do not revolt at the charge as improbable. The situation of such men is charmingly described by an eloquent poet of this country—
The needy man who has known better days;
One whom distress has spited at the world;
Is he whom tempting fiends would pitch upon
To do such deeds, as make the prosperous men
Lift up their hands and wonder who could do them.[24]
My client was no such man. No circumstance in his situation has afforded a temptation to be guilty of such wrongs to risk his name, his life, for the acquisition of what his fortune, his profession, were fully adequate, honestly and fairly, to procure him.
In these circumstances you are called upon to examine the evidence in this case with the nicest accuracy. You are bound by more than common ties to require the fullest and most explicit proofs of such enormous guilt, so improbable, so unprecedented, before you find a verdict against a man who was once upon the same respectable footing with yourselves, and supposed to be governed by the same honourable principles.