Read Online A Covenant with Death by Stephen Becker - Free Book Online Page B

rumor alone, and the spectators awaited confirmation of Talbot’s depravity; Dietrich did not disappoint them. There were men leaning forward, avid, bright-eyed; there were women who refused to look at Talbot or even at Dietrich except sidelong but who emanated prim attention. “The means, in this case,” Dietrich said, “was a pair of human hands. That Bryan Talbot had the opportunity is obvious; indeed that only Bryan Talbot had the opportunity seems equally obvious. It is the moral obligation of the state, however, to demonstrate a motive; and because—we admit this—there were no eyewitnesses, it is the state’s obligation to prove to you beyond question that the motive was of such emotional force that it could, and did, impel the defendant to the most extreme and irrevocable of human actions: murder.” And so on, for a minute or two, after which he digressed: “You must understand what first-degree murder is. Judge Hochstadter will instruct you further on that, later; for now I will say that first-degree murder is deliberate homicide by a human being who is sane within the legal definition and who has premeditated the act. That is, who has thought about it beforehand. There’s one tricky point here. He doesn’t have to have thought about it for months, or weeks, or days, or even hours. If the idea comes to him and he thinks about it for as much as five seconds, the murder is premeditated; the law assumes that any time for thought is sufficient time for a man to think twice, not only about killing but about the wrongness of killing. About the consequences.
    â€œNow I will tell you more exactly what the state will prove. The state will prove that in 1919 Bryan Talbot contracted a social disease.” He paused; utter silence. “That he communicated that disease to his wife Louise.” Another pause. “That as a result she was obliged to undergo surgery, more precisely an operation called a hysterectomy, as a natural result of which she was barred forever from bearing children.” I thought his pause here was not for effect; it was as though even he, after the days of preparation, was not ready to absorb such facts. But he may have been wishing that he had some women on the jury. “That as a further and later consequence, in her resentment of her husband she took at least one lover, with a strong probability that it was more than one; and that her husband’s motive for killing her was a violent resentment of her promiscuity coupled with a deadly sense of his own guilt in the tragic course of her life.”
    He was on dangerous ground, and knew it, and shifted immediately. “I suppose you are now thinking of certain ‘unwritten laws,’ by which traditionally a man discovering his wife in adultery is considered to be justified in taking violent action. Although the state believes that written laws are more important than unwritten, the state nevertheless acknowledges the strong emotions that may possess a man at such a time. But”—and here he gazed at each juror briefly—“the state will prove that it was not a sudden, instinctive reaction to one incident that motivated the accused. We will prove that Louise Talbot’s infidelities had occurred over a period of two years and more; that her husband knew about them and therefore condoned them; and that it was no single instance that drove him to murder—that, indeed, his wife had not been away from him for many weeks before the murder. The state will prove that this husband, who acquiesced in his wife’s infidelities for a long time, coldly and deliberately murdered her with absolutely no immediate provocation, out of his accumulated resentment of a situation which he himself, more than any other human being, had brought about. It was willful and premeditated murder.”
    He was silent for a few moments, and then drew a long breath. When he resumed his voice was more