“I will answer your plea,” returned the judge, “by ordering the case stricken from the docket and the prisoner discharged from custody.”
A murmur of amazement broke the tense hush of the crowded chamber. Guisseppi’s lawyer gasped.
“Am I to understand, your honor—”
“This is not mercy but law,” the judge continued. “This man is legally dead. He is without the pale of all law. A dead man can commit no crime. No provision in the whole range of jurisprudence recognizes the possibility of a dead man’s committing a crime. No man, in the purview of the law, can return from the dead. If we assume that this man was dead, he will remain dead forever in the eyes of the law. If by a miracle he has returned to life and committed murder, there is no punishment within the scope of the statutes that can be decreed against him.
“He is the super-outlaw of all history. Forever beyond the reach of law, the statutes are powerless to deal with him or punish him in any way. If he should shoot down every member of the jury that convicted him, if he should walk into court and kill the judge before whom his case was tried, the law could do nothing to him. He could spend his days as a bandit, robbing, plundering, murdering, and the law could not touch him. Legally he is a ghost, a shadow, an apparition, with no more reality than the beings in a dream. So far as the law is concerned, he does not exist. He can no more be imprisoned, hanged, punished or restricted in his actions than a phantom that exists only in the imagination.”
“A most wonderful construction of the law,” declared Guisseppi’s attorney in happy bewilderment at the turn of events.
“It is less a construction of law as it exists than an admission there is no law applicable to a man legally dead yet actually alive, a man who under the law does not exist. This boy, physically alive but legally dead, has murdered a man with deliberate purpose and malice aforethought. There is no doubt about that. If the law recognized his existence, he should be hanged. Justice demands that he be executed. But he is in some fourth-dimensional legal state beyond the reach of justice. The law is powerless to deal with him. As the administrator of the law, my hands are tied. There is nothing left for me but to set him at liberty.”
Despite the decision of the court that under the law he had no existence, Guisseppi left the chamber smiling and happy, acutely conscious of joyous life in every fibre of his being.
Policeman Rafferty was filled with righteous anger when he learned that he could not collect the $1,000 reward. In answer to his indignant questions, he was told the reward was offered for the arrest of “the person or persons guilty of the murder of Cardello,” and since Guisseppi was neither a person or anything else that the law recognized as existing, he was not guilty of the crime.