Circumstantial
状況証拠
The next morning the jury asked to review the physical evidence, and a clerk wheeled it in on a cart.
It was, Miriam noticed, a surprisingly small cart for a case that had consumed eleven days.
There was no murder weapon, for none had ever been found despite weeks of searching.
There were no fingerprints of the accused at the scene, and no trace of the victim's blood upon him.
What remained was a chain of circumstances, each link , the whole presented as .
Adrian Cole had quarrelled with the victim, Thomas Reyes, over money, and witnesses had heard them shout.
Cole stood to inherit the partner's share of a failing company, which supplied a .
He had no for the hour of the death, having been, he claimed, driving alone.
Taken together, these facts might well describe a murderer, or they might describe an unlucky man.
"Circumstantial evidence is not weak," argued a juror named Priya, who was usually silent.
"A footprint in fresh snow is circumstantial, and it can still tell you exactly who walked there."
Miriam agreed, and said so, unwilling to let her doubt harden into mere .
"Circumstantial evidence can be ," she said. "But it can also be arranged."
The difference, she suggested, lay in whether the facts pointed one way or merely could be pointed that way.
A is not an act, and being unloved by fortune is not the same as being guilty.
She reminded them that the same chain would fit any partner who had ever argued about money.
"Half the businesses in this city would empty into prison," she said, "if a were proof."
Harold nodded slowly, weighing her words against the tidy story the prosecutor had told.
, he observed, was a fine servant and a dangerous master in a room like this.
A juror named Frank grew impatient, insisting that people did not go to trial without reason.
"Where there is smoke," he began, and Miriam finished the phrase before he could: "there is sometimes only mist."
She did not deny that Cole might be guilty; she denied that the evidence compelled the conclusion.
To convict, she argued, they needed more than a story that happened to fit the accused.
They needed a story that could fit no one else, and this one fit too many.
The cart of evidence sat in the middle of the table, chiefly in what it lacked.
For a long moment no one spoke, and the absence of the weapon seemed to fill the room.
Priya, who had defended the evidence, now stared at the empty space where a weapon should have been.
"We keep talking about what he did," she said slowly. "But no one can show us the doing."