Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.
For if it is not lawful to take the law into our own hands and slay even a guilty person, whose death no public sentence has warranted. Then certainly he who kills himself is a homicide, and so much the guiltier of his own death as he was more innocent of that offence for which he doomed himself to die.
That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved.
Every guilty person is his own hangman.
As to adultery, let it be held disgraceful, in general, for any man or woman to be found in any way unfaithful when they are married, and called husband and wife. If during the time of bearing children anything of the sort occur, let the guilty person be punished with a loss of privileges in proportion to the offense.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.
If you wish to discover the guilty person, first find out to whom the crime might be useful.
Let wickedness escape as it may at the bar, it never fails of doing justice upon itself; for every guilty person is his own hangman.
It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death.
It is better to kill one hundred innocents than to let one guilty person go.
or simply:
