The five men were convicted
in the one verdict. There were not five separate verdicts, but
one indivisible verdict. If the (jurors') verdict were publicly
vitiated--if the government confessed or admitted that verdict to be
false--it was not one man, but five men, who were affected by it.
To be sure the reporters' jury, in _their_ verdict, did not include
Allen, O'Brien, Larkin, and Shore; but was it to be conveyed by
implication that omission from the reporters' verdict of acquittal was
more fatal to a man than inclusion in the verdict of guilty by a sworn
jury? Might not twenty, or thirty, or forty men, quite as intelligent
as the reporters, be soon forthcoming to testify as forcibly of Allen,
O'Brien, Larkin, and Shore, as the Press-men had testified of Maguire?
Was it only _reporters_ whose judgment could set aside the verdict of
sworn jurors, endorsed by ermined judges? But, in any event, the five
men were convicted by the one verdict. To cut that, loosed all--not
necessarily in law, perhaps, but inevitably as regarded public
conscience and universal judgment; for there was not in all the
records of English jurisprudence a precedent for executing men on a
verdict acknowledged to have been one of blunder or perjury. Clearly,
if the jurors were to be told by the government that, in a case
where life and death hung on the issue, they had been so blinded
by excitement, passion, or prejudice, that they declared to be a
guilty murderer a man whose innocence was patent even to unofficial
lookers-on in court, the moral value of such a verdict was
gone--ruined for ever; and to hang _anyone_ on such a verdict--_on
that identical verdict, thus blasted and abandoned_--would, it was
pointed out, be murder, for all its technical legality; neither more
nor less, morally, than cool, deliberate, cold-blooded murder.
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