the case is far
different when it affects persons who are only suspected, or against
whom the evidence is weak and imperfect; for, if citizens may be
arraigned and convicted for so grievous an offense as this upon
insufficient evidence, every one will feel his own personal safety
involved, and the tendency would be to intensify public feelings
against the whole process of the trial. It would be felt and argued
that they had been condemned upon evidence that would not have
convicted them in a civil court, and that they had been deprived,
therefore, of the advantage, which they would have had for their
defense. Reproach and contumely upon the government would be the
natural result, and the first occasion would arise in all history
for such demonstrations as would be sure to follow the condemnation
of mere citizens, and particularly of a woman, upon evidence on
which an acquittal would follow in a civil court. It is, therefore,
not only a matter of the highest concern to the accused themselves,
as a question of personal and private right, but also of great
importance upon considerations of general public utility and policy,
that the results of this trial, as affecting each of the accused,
among them Mrs. Surratt, shall be rigidly held within the bounds and
limitations that would control in the premises, if the parties were
on trial in a civil court upon an indictment equivalent to the
charges and specifications here. Conceding, as we have said, the
jurisdiction for the purpose of this branch of the argument, we hold
to the principle first enunciated as the one great, all-important,
and controlling rule that is to guide the commission in the findings
they are now about to make. In order to apply this principle to the
case of our client, we do not propose to range through the general
rules of evidence with a view to seeing how they square with the
facts as proven against her. In the examination of the evidence in
detail, many of these must from necessity be briefly alluded to; but
there is only one of them to which we propose in this place to
advert specifically, and that is the principle that may be justly
said to lie at the foundation of all the criminal law--a principle
so just, that it seems to have sprung from the brain of Wisdom
herself, and so undoubted and universal as to stand upon the
recognition of all the times and all the mighty intellects through
and by which the common law has been built up. We allude,