"In all my experience on the bench, I have not seen justice bow her
head in shame in this court until this day. You little realize what
far-reaching harm has just been wrought here under the fickle forms of law.
Imitation is the bane of courts--I thank God that this one is free from
the contamination of that vice--and in no long time you will see the
fatal work of this hour seized upon by profligate so-called guardians of
justice in all the wide circumstance of this planet and perpetuated in
their pernicious decisions. I wash my hands of this iniquity. I would
have compelled these culprits to expose their guilt, but support failed
me where I had most right to expect aid and encouragement. And I was
confronted by a law made in the interest of crime, which protects the
criminal from testifying against himself. Yet I had precedents of my own
whereby I had set aside that law on two different occasions and thus
succeeded in convicting criminals to whose crimes there were no witnesses
but themselves. What have you accomplished this day? Do you realize it?
You have set adrift, unadmonished, in this community, two men endowed
with an awful and mysterious gift, a hidden and grisly power for evil
--a power by which each in his turn may commit crime after crime of the
most heinous character, and no man be able to tell which is the guilty or
which the innocent party in any case of them all. Look to your homes
look to your property look to your lives for you have need!

"Prisoners at the bar, stand up. Through suppression of evidence, a jury
of your--our--countrymen have been obliged to deliver a verdict
concerning your case which stinks to heaven with the rankness of its
injustice. By its terms you, the guilty one, go free with the innocent.
Depart in peace, and come no more! The costs devolve upon the outraged
plaintiff--another iniquity. The court stands dissolved."