But he fought his losing cause with
courage and constancy. He ventured to arraign the severity of the statute
under which the young woman was tried. "In all other cases," he said,
"the first thing required of the criminal prosecutor was to prove
unequivocally that the crime libelled had actually been committed, which
lawyers called proving the _corpus delicti._ But this statute, made
doubtless with the best intentions, and under the impulse of a just
horror for the unnatural crime of infanticide, ran the risk of itself
occasioning the worst of murders, the death of an innocent person, to
atone for a supposed crime which may never have been committed by anyone.
He was so far from acknowledging the alleged probability of the child's
violent death, that he could not even allow that there was evidence of
its having ever lived."
The King's Counsel pointed to the woman's declaration; to which the
counsel replied--"A production concocted in a moment of terror and agony,
and which approached to insanity," he said, "his learned brother well
knew was no sound evidence against the party who emitted it. It was true,
that a judicial confession, in presence of the Justices themselves, was
the strongest of all proof, insomuch that it is said in law, that '_in
confitentem nullae sunt partes judicis._' But this was true of judicial
confession only, by which law meant that which is made in presence of the
justices, and the sworn inquest.
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