disputed, and the
defence, if my friend will allow me to say so, is so thin that I
don't propose to waste the time of the Court by taking you over the
evidence. The plea is one of temporary insanity. Well, gentlemen, I
daresay it is clearer to me than it is to you why this rather--what
shall we call it?--bizarre defence has been set up. The alternative
would have been to plead guilty. Now, gentlemen, if the prisoner had
pleaded guilty my friend would have had to rely on a simple appeal to
his lordship. Instead of that, he has gone into the byways and
hedges and found this--er--peculiar plea, which has enabled him to
show you the proverbial woman, to put her in the box--to give, in
fact, a romantic glow to this affair. I compliment my friend; I
think it highly ingenious of him. By these means, he has--to a
certain extent--got round the Law. He has brought the whole story of
motive and stress out in court, at first hand, in a way that he would
not otherwise have been able to do. But when you have once grasped
that fact, gentlemen, you have grasped everything. [With
good-humoured contempt] For look at this plea of insanity; we can't
put it lower than that. You have heard the woman. She has every
reason to favour the prisoner, but what did she say? She said that
the prisoner was not insane when she left him in the morning. If he
were going out of his mind through distress, that was obviously the
moment when insanity would have shown itself. You have heard the
managing clerk, another witness for the defence. With some
difficulty I elicited from him the admission that the prisoner,
though jumpy [a word that he seemed to think you would understand,
gentlemen, and I'm sure I hope you do], was not mad when the cheque
was handed to Davis. I agree with my friend that it's unfortunate
that we have not got Davis here, but the prisoner has told you the
words with which Davis in turn handed him the cheque; he obviously,
therefore, was not mad when he received it, or he would not have
remembered those words. The cashier has told you that he was
certainly in his senses when he cashed it. We have therefore the
plea that a man who is sane at ten minutes past one, and sane at
fifteen minutes past, may, for the purposes of avoiding the
consequences of a crime, call himself insane between those points of
time. Really, gentlemen, this is so peculiar a proposition that I am
not disposed to weary you with further argument.