midnight
`` I offer for your consideration , an instance of the fallibility of merely bare , unsupported denial of guilt on the part of the accused . A priest at Lauterbach was suspected , arrested and tried for the murder of a woman , under very aggravated circumstances . He was subjected to eighty examinations ; and each time solemnly denied the crime . Even when confronted at midnight with the skull of the victim murdered eight years before , he vehemently protested his innocence ; called on the skull to declare him not the assassin , and appealed to the Holy Trinity to proclaim his innocence . Finally he confessed his crime ; testified that while cutting the throat of his victim , he had exhorted her to repentance , had given her absolution , and that having concealed the corpse , he had said masses for her soul . `` The forlorn and hopeless condition of the prisoner at this bar , appeals pathetically to that compassion which we are taught to believe coexists with justice , even in the omnipotent God we worship ; yet in the face of incontrovertible facts elicited from reliable witnesses , of coincidences which no theory of accident can explain , can we stifle convictions , solely because she pleads ` not guilty ' ? Pertinent , indeed , was the ringing cry of that ancient prosecutor : ` Most illustrious Caesar !