Note 2 — Chapter XI

The verdict was the unsatisfactory one of "Not Proven"—unsatisfactory, that is, to the public, although doubtless preferable from the prisoner's point of view to one of "Guilty." The present writer, who chanced to hear the concluding part of the case, well remembers the surprise caused, both within and without the court, by the judge's strong summing up in the prisoner's favour. A legal kinsman of the writer told him subsequently what he had never before heard—that a Scottish judge, unlike an English one, considered it his duty not merely to sum up the evidence impartially, but also to direct the jury how to regard it from the point of view of a trained mind.