LEGAL INCIDENTS. XI. A NARROW ESCAPE. "T LEARNED a valuable lesson," said a New Jersey judge, "shortly after I came upon the bench. A young man was put on trial for stabbing and killing another man in a quarrel. The counsel finished their summing up about three o'clock in the after noon, and I gathered up the sheets of my written charge and faced the jury to address them. Had I delivered the charge as it was then prepared, the prisoner would have been convicted and hanged. "' Gentlemen of the jury,' I began. There was a stir in the jury-box. One of the twelve men arose and said he was unwell; would I not defer the charge until morning? It was a request which I could not refuse, and therefore I adjourned court at once. That evening I worried over the case a great deal. "Finally I concluded I would tear up the charge which I had prepared, study the evi dence all over again, and write a new charge. In reviewing the evidence again my attention was caught by a fact which the counsel and I had overlooked, or, at least, had. thought was of little importance. This was the fact, that on the forehead of the murdered man there was a little scratch. We had all had our thoughts fixed so firmly on the fatal knife-wound in the stomach that this scratch had been ignored. "The two men quarrelled, and the pris oner struck the other a blow in the face and knocked his hat off. Afterward they clashed again, and the fatal wound in the body was given. Now I asked myself for the first time, how did that fresh scratch get on the forehead? I pondered over the question half an hour, and conjectured that when that blow in the face was given and the hat knocked off, the murderer might have had his knife in his hand, and with that had done the scratching. Possibly he was whittling when
the quarrel began, and for this had drawn his knife. The fact was apparently a trivial one, and yet it was really of high importance; for it showed less deliberation on the part of the murderer than if he had purposely taken his knife out of his pocket to do the killing. You see, if he had been carrying murder in his heart, he would have done the stabbing when he gave, instead, that blow in the face. Ac cording to my conjecture, he then had the knife in his hand and open; and the fact that he did not use it proved that then he had no desire to kill the man. That desire came afterward, and probably was but a momentary impulse. "I felt that the point ought, at least, to be presented to the jury for their consideration, and the next morning I submitted it to them in my new charge. They jumped at it. Ju ries are always ready to spare a man's life; and they seized on this theory of mine, and brought in a verdict of murder in the second degree. I sentenced the man to the State prison, and some time afterward I asked his counsel what the exact truth about the mur der was. In those days a man on trial for his life could not testify, and therefore we had not heard the prisoner's story. "The counsel said his client denied to him all through the trial that he had done the stabbing at all, but after he was sentenced he acknowledged that he was the murderer. It all happened, he said, just as had been conjectured. He was whittling; they quar relled; he struck the other man a blow in the face; later they had a scuffle and he used his knife. "That man was innocent, I believe, of firstdegree murder; but if I had delivered to the jury the first charge which I wrote, he would probably have been hanged. This lesson taught me never to be too sure about a pris oner's guilt or innocence."
