Closing Argument in the Boston Massacre Trial

¹May it please your Honours, and you, Gentlemen of the Jury: I am for the prisoners at the bar, and shall apologize for it only in the words of the Marquis Beccaria: 'If I can but be the instrument of preserving one life, his blessings and tears of transport shall be a sufficient consolation to me for the contempt of all mankind.'

²The law, in all vicissitudes of government, fluctuations of the passions, or flights of enthusiasm, will preserve a steady undeviating course.

³It will not bend to the uncertain wishes, imaginations, and wanton tempers of men. The law is deaf, inexorable, inflexible.

⁴On the one hand it is inexorable to the cries and lamentations of the prisoners; on the other it is deaf, deaf as an adder, to the clamours of the populace.

⁵Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

⁶Nor is the law less stable than the fact. If an assault was made to endanger their lives, the law is clear: they had a right to kill in their own defence.

⁷If it was not so severe as to endanger their lives, yet if they were assaulted at all, struck and abused by blows of any sort, by snowballs, oyster-shells, cinders, clubs, or sticks of any kind, this was a provocation, for which the law reduces the offence of killing down to manslaughter.

⁸To your candour and justice I submit the prisoners and their cause. The law, in all vicissitudes of government, fluctuations of the passions, or flights of enthusiasm, will preserve a steady, undeviating course.

⁹It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished.

¹⁰But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, 'whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,' and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen, that would be the end of security whatsoever.