One was that of a young man, who had been tried for the murder of
his father. The evidence was entirely circumstantial, and was very
conflicting and doubtful; nor was it possible to assign any motive
which could have tempted him to the commission of so tremendous a
crime. He had been tried twice; and on the second occasion the
jury felt so much hesitation in convicting him, that they found a
verdict of manslaughter, or murder in the second degree; which it
could not possibly be, as there had, beyond all doubt, been no
quarrel or provocation, and if he were guilty at all, he was
unquestionably guilty of murder in its broadest and worst
signification.
The remarkable feature in the case was, that if the unfortunate
deceased were not really murdered by this own son of his, he must
have been murdered by his own brother. The evidence lay in a most
remarkable manner, between those two. On all the suspicious
points, the dead man's brother was the witness: all the
explanations for the prisoner (some of them extremely plausible)
went, by construction and inference, to inculcate him as plotting
to fix the guilt upon his nephew.
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