But even with what they had before them, the mystery still remains how any jury of reasonable men, appreciating the evidence properly, could say that there was no doubt as to Ross’s guilt. Reviewing it as dispassionately as one may, and without comparing it with the evidence for the defence, to be adverted to in a moment, the balance of probability, to say the very least, dips on the side of his innocence. The inherent weakness of the Crown case would remain though not one witness were called for the defence. The unfortunate thing for Ross was that the jury never was told that there was any weakness or inconsistency in the Crown evidence. On the contrary, the evidence was left to them, and, indeed, put to them, as though there was a cumulative force about it. At one stage they were told by the learned Judge that “the accused in his evidence denies what is attributed to him by Brophy, denies the statements of Ivy Matthews incriminating him, denies the statements of Olive Maddox incriminating him, denies Harding’s and Dunstan’s evidence, and denies also the evidence of Upton.” The inherent improbability of the supposed admission to Brophy, or the inherent probability of Ross’s account of it, was never suggested; the conflict between the Matthews and the Harding confessions was never hinted at; the fact that Dunstan had read Harding’s evidence, as given at the Morgue, and had not reported what he is supposed to have heard until after he had read it, was never adverted to; and the fact that Olive Maddox’s evidence could not be true that the girl was awake in the beaded room at 5 o’clock if Harding’s “confession” was true that she was asleep in the cubicle at that time was never referred to. It was never pointed out to the jury that Harding and Matthews were deposing only to confessions, and that, while it is possible for a man to say things that are verbally inconsistent, it is not possible for him to do things that are actually inconsistent, and that what the jury had to determine was not what Ross said, but what he did.