434
The Green Bag
an appeal against the judgment had been unavailing, in due time performed. Two or three years later, the real mur derer was discovered; his death-bed con fession and his revealing of facts which could not possibly be known to a third party, in connection with a careful investigation started by the Prussian government, removed all and every doubt that Thomas had anything what ever to do with the crime. The stir made by the affair was a tremendous one; the whole country was ringing with it for years. Even up to the present time, young lawyers plead ing in capital cases before a jury, when they have exhausted all arguments they can think of in favor of their clients, occasionally conjure up the shadow of the "ruthlessly murdered forester,"— not, however, without being seriously rebuked by the court. Of course mankind may not unjustly glean a good deal of comfort from the reflection that the victim of this mis carriage of justice was a thoroughly bad and dangerous character, a man with a police record showing several terms served in the penitentiary for the worst crimes of the calendar, who, in all human probability, in his long criminal career, had already committed, and per haps more than once, a deed making him liable to death penalty, and who, after a life spent in something like a nodding acquaintance with death, could almost be depended upon to die, sooner or later, in expiation of one of his desper ate crimes. But in spite of these ex tenuating circumstances, the impression left by the incident was so deep and uneffaceable that the kings of Prussia, as such, and since 1871 in their capacity as emperors of Germany, laid it down as a firmly established though unwritten rule for future guidance, to make the non-interference with the course of jus
tice, and accordingly the execution of death sentences, contingent upon a con fession. And the sovereign powers in the federal states followed invariably this example where in cases not belong ing to the jurisdiction of the empire the right of pardon rested with them. During the whole period of more than fifty years, there is only one single exception to this rule recorded, and that occurred when, in 1881, the old Emperor William, as King of Prussia, refused to avail himself of his constitutional right in favor of a driver of the name of Conrad who, though on exclusively cir cumstantial evidence, had been con victed and sentenced to death for having murdered his wife and his five little children, in order to thus remove the only obstacle standing in his way of marrying a young servant girl, thirtyfive years his junior, with whom he entertained illicit relations. Few crimi nal cases in German courts have attracted such widespread attention, or caused such intense feeling of disgust and ab horrence when the revolting details be came known. Moreover, there was a feature in the circumstantial evidence which appealed in quite an unusual degree to the interest not only of the legal fraternity, furnishing, as it did, a striking illustration of the fact that when the element of coincidence enters into an affair, those are not always right who pronounce that they have learned to distrust coincidence on principle. Conrad, who was of an intellect far above the average, and in morals hypo critical, astute, and thoroughly bad, had prepared most carefully for the crime contemplated by building up beforehand, to be used in a contingency, what he conceived to be an unshakable alibi, and by arranging everything so as to make it appear that his wife, in despair over being deserted by her husband, and
