Joseph McKenna

“ A charge of using an office to procure an indictment as part of a conspiracy to blackmail could not be justified or in any degree excused by the facts offered to be proved. One might be a careful and zealous officer and not stop to investigate the characters of prosecuting witnesses. Besides, the charge was not of careless credence of an accusation of crime against innocent men, but of a scheme deliberately planned, through a 'nefarious indictment,' to use the words of the libel, to extort money from innocent men. ”

“ The facts are set out at some length in the opinion of the court of appeals, and need not be repeated. It is enough to say that defendant in error, Talbott, was, at the time of the publication of the libel, state's attorney for the county of Montgomery, in the state of Maryland. During his incumbency of that office an indictment was found upon the testimony of one Hudson, charging plaintiffs in error with the crime of arson, for having set fire it was charged, to a building owned by them in Montgomery county. ”

“ We could not hold otherwise, unless we should hold that crime and credulity are one and the same thing, and we repeat that the mere neglect to investigate the character of witnesses is not equivalent to such disregard of the rights of others as to be tantamount to deliberate design, certainly not a deliberate design to blackmail. We say 'mere neglect,' because this was all the offer amounted to. It was already in evidence for what it was worth that Hudson was a stranger to Talbott. ”