"But I do not ask too much in asking that before your lordships
proceed to pass any sentence you will consider the manner in which
the court was divided on that question--to bear in mind that the
minority declaring against the legality and the validity of the
conviction was composed of some of the ablest and most experienced
judges of the Irish bench or any bench--to bear in mind that one of
these learned judges who had presided at the Commission Court was one
of the most emphatic in the Court of Criminal Appeal in declaring
against my liability to be tried; and moreover--and he ought to
know--that there was not a particle of evidence to sustain the cause
set up at the last moment, and relied upon by the crown, that I was
an 'accessory before the fact' to that famous Dublin overt act, for
which, as an afterthought of the crown, I was in fact tried. And I
ask you further to bear in mind that the affirmance of the conviction
was not had on fixed principles of law--for the question was
unprecedented--but on a speculative view of a suppositious case, and
I must say a strained application of an already over-strained and
dangerous doctrine--the doctrine of constructive criminality--the
doctrine of making a man at a distance of three thousand miles or
more, legally responsible for the words and acts of others whom he
had never seen, and of whom he had never heard, under the fiction, or
the 'supposition,' that he was a co-conspirator.
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