It is as much his duty to take care of the rights of one of the people as the rights of all. … Resting always on the evidence, his feet are fixed in the way they should go. … A human being moves in certain well-defined circles, which, joined together, make up a complete history of the man’s life. When you have a section of the arc of any man’s history, you are pretty well able to follow it to its completion. It is like the key to a puzzle around which the broken pieces naturally group themselves. There is the social life, the religious life, the business life, — will these sections of the arc fit together? Can you complete the ring? When you have them all they fall into place naturally; all phases join by an imperceptible cleavage; the circle is completed by those who, with hands joined, encompass the life. You see the complex whole. Here is the individual. You know the mainspring of his thoughts, his desires, his habits, his acts. Taken together you have his character; you have the man.
I am not obliged to give you the motive for a crime to prove it to have been perpetrated. … The motives of the human heart are often beyond comprehension. But it is the most natural thing in the world to ask, “Who could have desired to do this deed?” Therefore a motive is a part of the evidence, and when you can prove a motive, it becomes of the greatest importance. It excludes other possible agents, all things being equal, and becomes like a finger pointing unswervingly and declaring to the shrinking and guilty person, “Thou art the man!”
As the district attorney of that day did not see fit to so handle his evidence, no unswerving finger ever pointed out the guilty person. It is therefore not possible to make any direct accusation at this late day either by surmise or inference, but that the reader
