Culpability

“ How great may be the culpability in such cases when you are called upon to sacrifice all your worldly interests, and to be despised among men, or run the risk of involuntarily taking another person’s life, I could not pretend to judge ”

“ You have been compelled by the agonies of remorse, and the upbraidings and tortures of a guilty mind, to furnish that evidence against yourself, which was wanting to establish the proof of your guilt, and to supply that link in the chain of evidence which appeared to be imperfect. I trust, that every one who hears of your fate will bear in mind, that a time will arrive, probably in this world, most certainly in another, when guilt will meet with its due punishment. ”

“ Io, I have not only broken God’s law, but the laws of my country. Justice demands a victim. My cross is to let the world know my guilt, publicly to confess my crime and accept its penalty, even should it be a death of shame. ”

“ Eudocia
If thou art guilty, own thy crime at once; A poor defence will make thee doubly so. If the least guilt contaminates thy soul, My own would share by hearing thy excuse; I see thee not till time restore thy fame ”

“ But, on the one hand, as my self-accusation does not amount to a confession of guilt, so, on the other, it is possible that, if it did, the benefit resulting to others, from the record of an experience purchased at so heavy a price, might compensate, by a vast over-balance, for any violence done to the feelings I have noticed, and justify a breach of the general rule. Infirmity and misery do not, of necessity, imply guilt. ”

“ But such is the condition of guilt—its commission mean and tremulous—its defence artificial and insincere—its prosecution candid and simple—its condemnation dignified and austere. Such has been the defendant's guilt—such his defence—such shall be my address to you—and such, I trust, your verdict. The learned counsel has told you that this unfortunate woman is not to be estimated at forty thousand pounds. Fatal and unquestionable is the truth of this assertion. Alas! gentlemen, she is no longer worth anything; faded, fallen, degraded, and disgraced, she is worth less than nothing! ”

“ Let the guilt thou fearest be transferred from thee to us. If there be any guilt, may we and our posterity atone for it. But we do not acknowledge any guilt, and consequently, as not fearing any punishment, we boldly call it down on ourselves. ”

“ Thou alone knowest the wringing anguish, the desolation of sorrow that has made its home in thousands of poor mother's hearts, to be revealed only in that judgment day when the tempter and his victim shall be summoned to the bar of eternal justice, supplicants for that mercy which, while extended to all, abates naught of the exact measurement of the relative claims of each, neither absolves any from the righteous law of retribution which visits them in due proportion to their guilt.
"The first and most important question for us to decide, is the person to whom attaches the greatest guilt. ”

“ The Second Objection answered, that all have deserved punishment; in regard all have offended: That Men cannot judge who is more or less culpable. 'Tis God only that clearly discerns betwixt crimes, and therefore most justly punishes. Buut (say you) there are some people punished that are guiltless, and have no way deserved it: For this is your Second complaint or rather Calumny. Unadvised Youngman! Are there then any punished who have not deserved it? Where I beseech you are those innocent Nations to be found? ”

“ See how much care he taketh for them to relieve them from blame, and how much diligence they employed, so as not to leave to themselves so much as a shadow of an excuse. For which was right? to let go the acknowledged criminal, or Him about whose guilt there was a question? ”

“ Yet here, even here, to the very last, no touch of remorse has shaken you,--no shame has found place in your bosom. When proofs, as clear as day, have established rights of another and your own guilt, you have resisted, with base and dishonourable subterfuges, the restitution of that to which you had no claim; and have striven to murder, with words, him whom your steel was impotent to reach. ”

“ What I have hitherto said regards those who are present in the sense I have mentioned, and abetting the fact at the time of the commission of it. But there are others who may be involved in the same guilt, I mean the accessaries before the fact. These are all people who by advice, persuasion or any other means, procure the fact to be done, but cannot be said, in any sense, to be present at the actual perpetration of it.
“These persons are involved in the guilt, and liable in the case of wilful murder to the same punishment as the principal offenders are. ”

“ We try our culprit as we did in the old days of the ordeal. If luck will carry him through the hot ploughshares, we let him escape though we know him to be guilty. We give him the advantage of every technicality, and teach him to lie in his own defence, if nature has not sufficiently so taught him already.'
'You mean as to his plea of not guilty.'
'No, I don't; that is little or nothing, We ask him whether or no he confesses his guilt in a foolish way, tending to induce him to deny it; but that is not much. Guilt seldom will confess as long as a chance remains. ”

“ Thus, my lords, an inquiry appears, upon every supposition, useful and necessary; but I cannot comprehend how it can be prosecuted by any other method, than that of proposing an indemnity to those who shall make discoveries. Every wicked measure, my lords, must involve in guilt all who are engaged in it; and how easily it may be concealed from every other person, may be shown by an example of a crime, which no man will deny to have sometimes existed, and which, in the opinion of most, is not very uncommon in this age. ”

“ We charge guilt on planned and intended conduct that involves moral as well as legal wrong. And we do not mean conduct that is a natural and human, even if illegal, cutting of corners, such as many of us might well have committed had we been in the defendants' positions. ”

“ There will be a frenzy of self-accusation—whether just or unjust it doesn't matter—and as for the victors, they will say: 'Our enemies admit their guilt, so what further proof is needed?' Where the real guilt is, that is an irrelevant and trivial question. ”

“ Is there any doubt to whom the guilt belongs, when you see on one side a broker, an enemy, an assassin, the same being also now our accuser, and on the other side a needy man, the son of the murdered man, highly thought of by his friends, on whom not only no crime but no suspicion even can be fixed? ”

“ The fallen should not be laughed at nor condemned, but aided. Well, since the guilt contemplated is equal to the guilt consummated, and both incur the same punishment, let me descend wholly into the abyss of crime and die. ”

“ In some of the houses over which my eyes roam so coldly, guilt is entering into hearts that are still tenanted by a debased and trodden virtue,—guilt is on the very edge of commission, and the impending deed might be averted; guilt is done, and the criminal wonders if it be irrevocable. ”

“ However, I flatter myself, you will take warning from this instance of your misconduct, and be taught, that it is impossible to fix bounds to a bad action, or to say, I will go on so far in error, and then I will stop: when once you consent to the smallest deviation from innocence, it is not possible to determine how deeply you may be involved in guilt, or to what lengths of mischief or wickedness your first fault may conduce. ”

“ In criminal cases, if an accuser offered battle, the defendant was forced either to accept it or to confess his guilt, unless he could prove an alibi, or unless the accuser was himself notoriously guilty of the crime in question, and the accusation was evidently a mere device to shift the guilt to the shoulders of another ”

“ If proven guilty he must atone for the guilt. If acquitted fairly, openly, without the aid of money or influence, then are we guilty, Jacob Strong, guilty as those who hurl a man to the brink of a precipice, which he is sure to plunge down."
"No man who simply pursues his duty should reproach himself for the crime of another," was the grave reply. ”

“ Nothing, my lords, is more obvious, than that this offer of indemnity may produce perjury and false accusation; nothing is more probable, than that he who is conscious of any atrocious villanies, which he cannot certainly secure from discovery, will snatch this opportunity of committing one crime more, to set himself free from the dread of punishment, and blot out his own guilt for ever, by charging lord ORFORD as one of his accomplices. ”

“ But it is forgotten that if the person punished is supposed to be innocent, or even if there be any doubt of his guilt, the spectator will reflect that his own danger, whatever it may be, is not contingent on his guiltiness, but threatens him equally if he remains innocent, and how, therefore, is he deterred from guilt by the apprehension of such punishment? ”

“ If my son is guilty, must his crime go unpunished though his father's hand is not lifted against him? For what business are you yourself on this little plot of earth? You are here to punish the evil-doer. It is for you to punish him if he is guilty. ”

“ He spoke strongly against the danger of accepting circumstantial evidence as the conclusive proof of her guilt, discussed the divine nature of law, and the solemn responsibilities resting on those who assume its official duties, to see to it that injustice is done to none, urging the oft-repeated truism that it is better for a dozen guilty to escape than that one innocent should suffer. ”

“ Others too, who would be thought to have no part of their guilt, must, before they are thought innocent, shew that they did all that was in their power to prevent that guilt, and to check their proceedings. ”

“ But, if care be taken to inflict no more punishment than is due for an offence; it may be greater or less, in proportion to the utility to be derived from thence.
XXIX. In examining the different degrees of guilt, we ought to take into the account the motives which impelled the offender to commit the act—the motives, which ought to have restrained him therefrom, and how far he was capable of yielding to either. Scarce any one does a wicked action without some motive, or so far strips himself of the nature of man, as to delight in such acts from pure malignity. ”

“ If they have not, they are included in the guilt. Whether they are actually engaged in these crimes or not, they will be included among the guilty ones, while they suffer these things when it is in their power to stop them. ”

“ Instances of punishment in visions, apprehensions, and inward wretchedness, while there was no outward infliction of penalty.
11. There is really no need that punishment be inflicted; guilt is in the consciousness of the guilty its own adequate punishment.
12. Objection is made by one of the interlocutors to the justice of punishing children or posterity for the guilt of fathers or ancestors, and he heaps up an incongruous collection of cases in which he mingles confusedly the action of the Divine Providence and that of human caprice or malignity. ”

“ But is the motive of punishment for retribution worthy of a moral person? If the proper aim of punishment were retributive, the returning of evil for evil in proportionate measure, how could the amount of punishment be determined in case of such offenses as perjury, deception, or treason? ”

“ The representation of guilt with its painful and degrading consequences, has been universally considered to be the best means of warning youth against the danger of temptation;—the benefits to be expected from example are too plainly exhibited by the infliction of punishment to need repetition; and the more generally the effects of crime are shown, and the more the horrors which precede{vi} detection and the deplorable fate of the guilty are made known, the greater is the probability that the atrocity of vice may be abated and the security of the public promoted. ”

“ You have gone on for a long time in your nefarious course, unchecked by any consideration for those innocent beings against whom your evil practices have been directed, and undeterred either by the pangs of that remorse, which must at times have overshadowed even such a hardened soul as yours, or by the fear of that punishment which, though long deferred, was certain to arrive at last. ”

“ Why should you hide, as though you were a culprit? You have been so completely exonerated from the imputation of guilt which once hung over you, that you owe it to yourself to front the gaze of the world fearlessly. What have you to dread? ”

“ Perhaps we have done acts, that, in proportion to the temptation or provocation, were less excusable than his great crime. Silent pity and sorrow for the victim should mingle with our detestation of the guilt. ”

“ Instead of helping him out you dragged him farther in, pressing him down in the mire, so that, by dint of standing on his body, you might yourselves reach the bank, at the cost of his entire destruction. Though he is guilty, your guilt is a thousand times as great. ”

“ The first principle in the management of the guilty seems to me to be to treat them as men and women; which they were before they were guilty, and will be when they are no longer so; and which they are in the midst of it all. Their humanity is the principal thing about them; their guilt is a temporary state. ”

“ But it ought to be a support to your mind, sufficient to keep you from sinking under the weight of such an accusation, that you are to be tried before so noble, discerning, and equal judges, that nothing but your guilt can hurt you. ”

“ I said to myself: the guilt that arises from what men do is small and scarcely comparable to the guilt that arises from what they fail to do. For what kinds of men are those, after all, who become guilty through their deeds? Poor, wretched, driven, desperate, half-mad creatures, who lift themselves up and bite the foot that treads them under. ”