God forbid, gentlemen, that I were capable of wishing to press on your minds these circumstances in my client’s once honourable and happy situation, with a view of creating in your minds an undue bias in his favour. Though your discernment were not, as I know it is, sufficient to secure you against the effect of such considerations, my feelings as a man, and a sense of my professional duty, would not allow me to resort to such arguments in opposition to justice, which is no respecter of persons. Yet, gentlemen, there is a view in which I am entitled to call your attention to the former situation and circumstances of this unfortunate gentleman; for unfortunate I must call him, be the result of the present trial life or death. In deciding on evidence in support of a criminal charge, the former character of the prisoner, his probable temptations to commit the offence with which he is charged, must ever be a material consideration. A poor, forlorn wretch, without fortune, without friends, without education, without occupation, is he who is naturalised to support himself by private or open depredation on the public; and when such a person is accused, the minds of a jury, though they must presume his innocence, do not revolt at the charge as improbable. The situation of such men is charmingly described by an eloquent poet of this country-- The needy man who has known better days; One whom distress has spited at the world; Is he whom tempting fiends would pitch upon To do such deeds, as make the prosperous men Lift up their hands and wonder who could do them.[24] My client was no such man. No circumstance in his situation has afforded a temptation to be guilty of such wrongs to risk his name, his life, for the acquisition of what his fortune, his profession, were fully adequate, honestly and fairly, to procure him. In these circumstances you are called upon to examine the evidence in this case with the nicest accuracy. You are bound by more than common ties to require the fullest and most explicit proofs of such enormous guilt, so improbable, so unprecedented, before you find a verdict against a man who was once upon the same respectable footing with yourselves, and supposed to be governed by the same honourable principles. But, gentlemen, while I mentioned the situation which Mr. Brodie once held in life, his family, his fortune, his friends, I must admit, however degrading to him the acknowledgment may be, that this unhappy man, instead of pursuing with industry the useful and reputable occupation by which his own fortune was acquired, and by which it might have been preserved, and with it his own peace, honour, and happiness, has for years past so far yielded himself to idleness and dissipation, and to what in the present age is too often the sad concomitant of such habits, an unhappy itch for gambling, as to lead him into the company of persons with whom, for any other purpose, he would have disdained to associate.