“With terrible eloquence the prosecutor has described to us the dreadful state of the prisoner’s mind at Mokroe when love again lay before him calling him to new life, while love was impossible for him because he had his father’s bloodstained corpse behind him and beyond that corpse—retribution. And yet the prosecutor allowed him love, which he explained, according to his method, talking about his drunken condition, about a criminal being taken to execution, about it being still far off, and so on and so on. But again I ask, Mr. Prosecutor, have you not invented a new personality? Is the prisoner so coarse and heartless as to be able to think at that moment of love and of dodges to escape punishment, if his hands were really stained with his father’s blood? No, no, no! As soon as it was made plain to him that she loved him and called him to her side, promising him new happiness, oh! then, I protest he must have felt the impulse to suicide doubled, trebled, and must have killed himself, if he had his father’s murder on his conscience. Oh, no! he would not have forgotten where his pistols lay! I know the prisoner: the savage, stony heartlessness ascribed to him by the prosecutor is inconsistent with his character. He would have killed himself, that’s certain. He did not kill himself just because ‘his mother’s prayers had saved him,’ and he was innocent of his father’s blood. He was troubled, he was grieving that night at Mokroe only about old Grigory and praying to God that the old man would recover, that his blow had not been fatal, and that he would not have to suffer for it. Why not accept such an interpretation of the facts? What trustworthy proof have we that the prisoner is lying?
“But we shall be told at once again, ‘There is his father’s corpse! If he ran away without murdering him, who did murder him?’ Here, I repeat, you have the whole logic of the prosecution. Who murdered him, if not he? There’s no one to put in his place.