Читать книгу The Gun Alley Tragedy: Record of the Trial of Colin Campbell Ross онлайн

3 страница из 14

All students of criminology—and all friends of truth—are under a debt of gratitude to Mr. Brennan for the cool, precise and perfectly dispassionate manner in which he has, inter alia, analysed the statements of these two people, Harding and Matthews. He has placed the salient features side by side. There seems no escape from the irresistible logic of his conclusion—that Matthews and Harding, knowing certain facts about Ross from an outside source, were compelled to fill in the gaps in their own way. They could not have been drawing from the one alleged source when they differed so absolutely as to the essential circumstances of the crime.

As Mr. Brennan points out, he is not undertaking to prove that Ross was innocent of the Gun Alley murder. Anyone who reads his closely reasoned pages can have little doubt that such is his opinion. But his task is simpler. It is to show that Ross should not have been convicted on the evidence, that the evidence for the Crown was, to a large extent, contradictory—far more so than in the heat and passion of the trial was allowed to appear. He is able to go even further than that, and to show that a great part of it, so far from being cumulative on other parts, as the jury may have naturally believed, was really destructive of those other parts.