“But, I shall be told, perhaps he pretended to be sick precisely so that no one would suspect him, and informed the defendant about the money and the signals precisely to tempt him into coming and killing him himself, and, don’t you see, when he has killed him and leaves, taking the money with him, perhaps while doing so he will make some noise and clatter, awaking witnesses, and then, you see, Smerdyakov can also get up and go—well, what will he go and do? Why, he will precisely go and kill his master a second time, and a second time take the already-taken money. Do you laugh, gentlemen? Personally I am ashamed to make such suggestions, and yet, just imagine, this very thing is precisely what the defendant asserts: after me, he says, when I had already left the house, knocked Grigory down and raised the alarm, he got up, went in, killed, and robbed. I will not even ask how Smerdyakov could have calculated all this beforehand and foreknown it all as if on his fingers, I mean, that the furious and exasperated son would come with the sole purpose of peeking respectfully in the window, though he knew the signals, and then retreat, leaving him, Smerdyakov, with all the booty! Gentlemen, I put the question to you seriously: where is the moment when Smerdyakov committed his crime? Show me that moment, for without it there can be no accusation.
“But perhaps the falling fit was real. The sick man suddenly came to, heard a cry, went out—well, and what then? He looked around and said to himself: why don’t I go and kill the master? But how would he know what was going on, what was happening there, if he had been lying unconscious up to then? No, gentlemen, fantasy, too, must have its limits.
“‘Well, sir,’ subtle people will say, ‘and what if the two were accomplices, what if they murdered him together and divided the money—what then?’
“Yes, indeed, that is a weighty suspicion, and, to begin with, there is colossal evidence to confirm it: one kills and takes all the labor upon himself, and the other accomplice lies on his back pretending to have a falling fit, precisely with the aim of arousing suspicion in everyone ahead of time, of alarming the master, of alarming Grigory. With what motives, I wonder, could the two accomplices have thought up precisely such an insane plan? But perhaps it was not at all an active complicity on Smerdyakov’s part, but, so to speak, passive and suffering: perhaps the bullied Smerdyakov merely agreed not to resist the murder and, anticipating that he would be accused of allowing his master to be killed, of not shouting or resisting, negotiated with Dmitri Karamazov beforehand for permission to spend the time lying down as if in a falling fit, ‘and you can go and kill him any way you like, it’s none of my apples.’ But even so, since this falling fit, again, would be bound to cause a commotion in the house, Dmitri Karamazov, foreseeing that, would by no means agree to such an arrangement. But suppose he did agree: in that case it would still come out that Dmitri Karamazov was the murderer, the direct murderer and instigator, while Smerdyakov would only be a passive participant, and not even a participant, but merely a conniver out of fear and against his will, as the court would surely discern—and yet what do we see? No sooner is the defendant arrested than he at once shifts all the blame onto Smerdyakov alone and accuses him alone. He does not accuse him as his accomplice, but him alone: he alone did it, he says, he killed him and robbed him, it is his handiwork! But what sort of accomplices are they, if they immediately start denouncing each other—no, that never happens. And notice the risk for Karamazov: he is the chief murderer, the other is not the chief one, he is merely a conniver, he was lying down behind the partition, and now he shifts it all onto the one lying down. But he, the one lying down, might get angry, and just for reasons of self-preservation alone might hasten to proclaim the real truth: we both participated, only I didn’t kill him, I just went along and connived at it out of fear. For surely he, Smerdyakov, would be able to understand that the court would immediately perceive the degree of his guilt, and he could therefore reckon that if he were to be punished, it would be far less severely than the other one, the chief murderer, who wanted to shift it all onto him. Which means, then, that willy-nilly he would make a confession. This, however, we have not seen. Smerdyakov never so much as whispered about any complicity, despite the fact that the murderer firmly accused him, and kept pointing at him all along as the sole murderer. Moreover, it was Smerdyakov who revealed to the prosecution that he himself had informed the defendant of the envelope with the money and of the signals, and that without him he would never have known anything. If he was indeed an accomplice and guilty, would he inform the prosecution of it so lightly—that is, that he himself informed the defendant of all that? On the contrary, he would try to deny it, and would most certainly distort the facts and diminish them. But he did not distort and he did not diminish. Only an innocent man, who has no fear of being accused of complicity, would act that way. And so, yesterday, in a fit of morbid melancholy resulting from his falling sickness and the outbreak of this whole catastrophe, he hanged himself. And, hanging himself, he left a note, written in his own peculiar style: ‘I exterminate myself by my own will and liking, so as not to blame anybody.’ It would have cost him nothing to add: ‘I am the murderer, not Karamazov. ‘ But he did not add it: did he have enough conscience for the one thing, but not for the other?
“And now what? This afternoon money was brought into court, three thousand roubles—’the same,’ we were told, ‘that was here in this envelope, which is on the table with the material evidence; received yesterday from Smerdyakov,’ we were told. But you yourselves, gentlemen of the jury, cannot have forgotten that sad picture. I will not go back over the details, but all the same I shall allow myself to make two or three observations, choosing from the most insignificant of them—precisely because they are insignificant, and so will not have occurred to everyone and might be forgotten. First, once again, we have Smerdyakov, yesterday, returning the money in remorse and hanging himself. (For without remorse he would not have returned the money.) And of course it was only yesterday evening that he confessed his crime for the first time to Ivan Karamazov, as Ivan Karamazov himself declared, otherwise why would he have been silent about it up to now? He confessed, then; but, I repeat once more, why did he not proclaim the whole truth to us in his dying note, knowing that the innocent defendant was going to his last judgment the very next day? The money alone is no proof. I, for example, and two other persons in this room, became acquainted with a certain fact quite by chance a week ago—namely, that Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov sent two five-percent bank notes, for five thousand roubles each, that is, ten thousand in all, to the provincial capital to be cashed. All I mean to say is that anyone could happen to have money on a given day, and by producing three thousand one does not necessarily prove that it is the same money as lay precisely in some particular drawer or envelope. Finally, having received such important information from the real murderer yesterday, Ivan Karamazov kept still. Why did he not report it at once? Why did he put it off till the next morning? I suppose I have the right to guess why: his health had been unsettled for about a week, he himself confessed to the doctor and to those closest to him that he was having visions, meeting people who were already dead; on the verge of brain fever, which struck him precisely today, having learned unexpectedly of Smerdyakov’s demise, he suddenly forms the following argument: ‘The man is dead, he can be denounced, and I will save my brother. I have money: I’ll take a wad of bills and say that Smerdyakov gave it to me before he died.’ You will tell me it is dishonest; that even though the man is dead, it is still dishonest to lie, even to save a brother? Perhaps so, but what if he lied unconsciously, what if he himself imagined that it happened that way, his mind precisely being struck finally by the news of the lackey’s sudden death? You did see that scene today, you saw what state the man was in. He stood here and spoke, but where was his mind? Today’s testimony from a delirious man was followed by a document, the defendant’s letter to Miss Verkhovtsev, written by him two days before he committed the crime, containing beforehand a detailed program of the crime. Why, then, are we looking for the program and its authors? It was accomplished exactly following this program, and accomplished by none other than its author. Yes, gentlemen of the jury, ‘accomplished as written!’ And in no case, in no case did we run respectfully and timidly from our father’s window, being at the same time firmly convinced that our sweetheart was there with him. No, that is absurd and impossible. He went in and—finished the business. Very likely he killed him in exasperation, in anger, which flared up as soon as he looked at his foe and rival, but once he had killed him, which he probably did instantly, with one swing of the arm wielding the brass pestle, and made sure, after a thorough search, that she was not there, he still did not forget to slip his hand under the pillow and take the envelope with the money, the torn remains of which are lying here on the table with the material evidence. What I am getting at is that you should notice one circumstance, in my opinion a highly characteristic one. Were we dealing here with an experienced murderer, and precisely with a murderer whose sole purpose was robbery—well, would he have left the torn envelope on the floor, where it was found, next to the body? Were it Smerdyakov, for example, killing for the sake of robbery—why, he would simply have taken the whole envelope with him, without bothering in the least to open it over his victim’s body; because he knew for certain that the money was in the envelope—it had been put there and sealed in his presence—and if he had taken the envelope away altogether, would anyone even know there had been a robbery? I ask you, gentlemen of the jury, would Smerdyakov have acted this way? Would he have left the envelope on the floor? No, that is precisely how a frenzied murderer would act, one who is not thinking well, a murderer who is not a thief, who has never stolen anything before, and who even now snatches the money from under the bed not as a thief stealing, but as someone taking his own back from the thief who has stolen it—for that is precisely the idea Dmitri Karamazov had of those three thousand roubles, which had become almost a mania with him. And so, taking hold of this envelope, which he has never seen before, he tears it open to make sure the money is there, then runs away with the money in his pocket, forgetting even to think that he is leaving behind a colossal accusation against himself in the form of a torn envelope lying on the floor. All because it was Karamazov, not Smerdyakov; he did not think, he did not see, and how could he! He runs away, he hears the shout of the servant overtaking him, the servant seizes him, stops him, and falls, struck down by the brass pestle. The defendant jumps down to him ... out of pity. Imagine, he suddenly assures us that he jumped down to him then out of pity, out of compassion, in order to see if he could help him in some way. But was that any moment to be showing such compassion? No, he jumped down precisely in order to make sure that the only witness to his evil deed was no longer alive. Any other feeling, any other motive would be unnatural! Notice, he takes trouble over Grigory, he wipes his head with a handkerchief, and, convinced that he is dead, he runs, out of his senses, all covered with blood, there, to the house of his sweetheart—how did it not occur to him that he was covered with blood and would give himself away at once? But the defendant himself assures us that he never even noticed he was covered with blood; that is conceivable, that is very possible, that always happens with criminals in such moments. Devilish calculation in the one case, and in the other no discernment at all. But his only thought at that moment was of where she was. He had to find out quickly where she was, and so he runs to her place and learns some unexpected and colossal news: she has gone to Mokroye with her ‘former,’ ‘indisputable’ one!”