m, by the law, that he should bring precise proof
of the murder, or of the prisoner's accession to it. It was the very
purpose of the statute to substitute a certain chain of presumptive
evidence in place of a probation, which, in such cases, it was peculiarly
difficult to obtain. The jury might peruse the statute itself, and they
had also the libel and interlocutor of relevancy to direct them in point
of law. He put it to the conscience of the jury, that under both he was
entitled to a verdict of Guilty.

The charge of Fairbrother was much cramped by his having failed in the
proof which he expected to lead. But he fought his losing cause with
courage and constancy. He ventured to arraign the severity of the statute
under which the young woman was tried. "In all other cases," he said,
"the first thing required of the criminal prosecutor was to prove
unequivocally that the crime libelled had actually been committed, which
lawyers called proving the _corpus delicti._ But this statute, made
doubtless with the best intentions, and under the impulse of a just
horror for the unnatural crime of infanticide, ran the risk of itself
occasioning the worst of murders, the death of an innocent person, to
atone for a supposed crime which may never have been committed by anyone.
He was so far from acknowledging the alleged probability of the child's
violent death, that he could not even allow that there was evidence of
its having ever lived."

The King's Counsel pointed to the woman's declaration; to which the
counsel replied--"A production concocted in a moment of terror and agony,
and which approached to insanity," he said, "his learned brother well
knew was no sound evidence against the party who emitted it. It was true,
that a judicial confession, in presence of the Justices themselves, was
the strongest of all proof, insomuch that it is said in law, that '_in
confitentem nullae sunt partes judicis._' But this was true of judicial
confession only, by which law meant that which is made in presence of the
justices, and the sworn inquest. Of extrajudicial confession, all
authorities held with the illustrious Farinaceus and Matthaeus,
'_confessio extrajudicialis in se nulla est; et quod nullum est, non
potest adminiculari._' It was totally inept, and void of all strength and
effect from the beginning; incapable, therefore, of being bolstered up or
supported, or, according to the law phrase, adminiculated, by other
presumptive circums