“Yes, but he talked in the taverns of murdering his father, and two days before, on the evening when he wrote his drunken letter, he was quiet and only quarreled with a shopman in the tavern, because a Karamazov could not help quarreling, forsooth! But my answer to that is, that, if he was planning such a murder in accordance with his letter, he certainly would not have quarreled even with a shopman, and probably would not have gone into the tavern at all, because a person plotting such a crime seeks quiet and retirement, seeks to efface himself, to avoid being seen and heard, and that not from calculation, but from instinct. Gentlemen of the jury, the psychological method is a two-edged weapon, and we, too, can use it. As for all this shouting in taverns throughout the month, don’t we often hear children, or drunkards coming out of taverns shout, ‘I’ll kill you’? but they don’t murder anyone. And that fatal letter—isn’t that simply drunken irritability, too? Isn’t that simply the shout of the brawler outside the tavern, ‘I’ll kill you! I’ll kill the lot of you!’ Why not, why could it not be that? What reason have we to call that letter ‘fatal’ rather than absurd? Because his father has been found murdered, because a witness saw the prisoner running out of the garden with a weapon in his hand, and was knocked down by him: therefore, we are told, everything was done as he had planned in writing, and the letter was not ‘absurd,’ but ‘fatal.’
“Now, thank God! we’ve come to the real point: ‘since he was in the garden, he must have murdered him.’ In those few words: ‘since he was , then he must ’ lies the whole case for the prosecution. He was there, so