William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 1

[169] with a married man, and finding that false love run no smoother than true, Laura loaded her revolver, and in presence of his wife and children, pistoled her paramour, coolly and in open day. Laura is a heroine. Tried for murder, and acquitted on the ground of emotional insanity, she lives in style, gives balls, and speculates in stock. Few ladies are so often named at dinner-tables, and the public journals note her doings as the movements of a duchess might be noted in Mayfair.

Laura's torch has lighted many a fair sister on the way to murder; yet, in spite of this increase in female crime, no woman's life has yet been given in California to public justice.

“No, we cannot hang a woman in this country,” says a judge of the Supreme Court; “it is not easy to hang a man, and when we send a murderer to the gallows, he complains that he is made the victim of his judge, and not his jury. A judge will never get twelve men to find a female guilty of wilful murder in San Francisco; nor in any other city west of the Rocky Mountains. An excuse is always found by the jury; a petticoat being too much for bar and bench!”