The Trial of Lizzie Borden Quotes

“an aged man and an aged woman are suddenly and brutally assassinated. It was a terrible crime. It was an impossible crime. But it was committed.”
― Cara Robertson, The Trial of Lizzie Borden

“The notion that a crime could be clearly gendered was rooted in European models of criminology, but such models of criminality struggled to account for a female criminal. Within the prevailing models of the human mind, women were seen as somewhat less evolved than men and with a corresponding lack of rational control over their actions—barely protected from their underlying degeneracy by male control, especially over their sexuality.”
― Cara Robertson, The Trial of Lizzie Borden

“William Westcott: “American. Farmer. Independent in Politics. Comes to Congregational church. Not interested in religion. Married and second wife. Has not talked about the case.”
― Cara Robertson, The Trial of Lizzie Borden

“In every detail it shows the stubborn and dogged brutality of the insane.”
― Cara Robertson, The Trial of Lizzie Borden

“Later, he went further, arguing against capital punishment for any defendant: “That the punishment of murder by death does not tend to diminish or prevent that crime; that a man who is so far lost to reason as to conceive the commission of murder with deliberate and premeditated malice aforethought does not enter into a discussion with himself of the consequences of the crime; that the infliction of the death penalty is not in accord with the present advance of civilization, and that it is a relic of barbarism, which the community must surely outgrow, as it has already outgrown the rack, the whipping post, and the stake.”
― Cara Robertson, The Trial of Lizzie Borden

“The suspected witch was in the dock, the fagots had been piled all around her . . . and the hard-headed District Attorney was flourishing an unlighted torch before the audience. But it took only an hour for the jury to decide that witches are out of fashion in Massachusetts and no one is to be executed there on suspicion and on parrot-like police testimony.”
― Cara Robertson, The Trial of Lizzie Borden

“Knowlton then turned to the defense’s trump card: Where was the blood? As he put it, “How could she have avoided the spattering of her dress with blood if she was the author of these crimes?” Acknowledging this weakness, he suggested that she might have taken advantage of the “solitude of the house with ample fire on the stove.” Perhaps Lizzie used a roll of paper to protect her dress or, more likely, she hid the bloodstained dress until she burned it in the kitchen the next Sunday. But he admitted: “I cannot answer it. You cannot answer it . . . You have neither the craft of the assassin nor the cunning and deftness of the sex.”
― Cara Robertson, The Trial of Lizzie Borden