“At a later period occurred the trial of Nephi for the murder of
Seantum, the Chief Judge. The real murderer was the judge’s brother, who is
forced to confess by a series confessions based on threats such as would
undoubtedly be rejected by the judge of an English criminal court. Finally
comes the statement, `because of this fear and this paleness which has come
upon your face, behold we know that thou art guilty.’”
James
Williams, “The Law of the Book of Mormon” American
Law Review 34 (1900): 222.
John W. Welch has written
extensively on the subject of law and the Book of Mormon published an article in
1992 in which he wrote the following:
The trial of Seantum in Helaman 7-8 raises some interesting points of
Nephite and Israelite law. The story is familiar, how Nephi spoke from his
garden tower (see Helaman 7:10), was threatened with a lawsuit for reviling
against the government, but in the end revealed that the chief judge was
"murdered, and he [lay] in his blood; and he [had] been murdered by his
brother, who [sought] to sit in the judgment-seat" (Helaman 8:27). Five
men ran and found things to be as Nephi had said.
A public proclamation was then sent out by heralds announcing the
murder and calling a day of fasting, mourning, and burial (see Helaman 9:10).
The day after the death of a political leader was traditionally a day of
fasting, mourning, and burial (see 1 Samuel 31:13; 2 Samuel 1:12).
Following the burial, five suspects (the men who had been sent to
investigate) were brought to the judges. They could not be convicted, however,
on circumstantial evidence, for such was ruled out under Israelite law, which
required every fact to be substantiated by the testimony of two eyewitnesses
(see Deuteronomy 19:15). This presented a serious problem in this particular
case, however, for no one had witnessed the killing of the chief judge. Seantum
had killed his brother "by a garb of secrecy" (Helaman 9:6).
Cases of unwitnessed murders presented special problems under the law
of Moses. While the two-witness rule would seem to stand insurmountably in the
way of ever obtaining a conviction in such cases, such slayings could not
simply be ignored. If a person was found slain in the land and the murderer could
not be found, solemn rituals, oaths of innocence, and special purification of
all the men in the village had to be performed (see Deuteronomy 21:1-9). Things
turned out differently in Seantum's case, however, for he was soon exposed in a
way that opened the door to an exceptional rule of evidence that justified his
conviction.
Nephi first revealed to the people that Seantum was the murderer, that
they would find blood on the skirts of his cloak, and that he would say certain
things to them when they told him, "We know that thou are guilty"
(Helaman 9:34). Indeed, Seantum was soon detected and immediately confessed his
guilt (see Helaman 9:37-38).
Seantum's self-incriminating admission would normally not be admissible
in a Jewish court of law. Under the Talmud, no man could be put to death on his
own testimony: "No man may call himself a wrongdoer," especially in a
capital case (TB, Sanhedrin 9b). But from earlier times came four episodes that
gave rise to an exception to this rule against self-incriminating confessions
under certain circumstances. Those precedents, each of which involved
convictions or punishments based on confessions, were the executions of (1)
Aachan (see Joshua 7), of (2) the man who admitted that he had killed Saul (see
2 Samuel 1:10-16), and of (3) the two assassins of Ishbosheth, the son of Saul
(see 2 Samuel 4:8-12), as well as (4) the voluntary confession of Micah, the
son who stole from his mother (see Judges 17:1-4).
The ancients reconciled these four cases with their rigid two-witness
rule by explaining that they involved confessions before trial or were
proceedings before kings or rulers instead of judges (See Menachem Elon, The
Principles of Jewish Law [Jerusalem: Keter, 1975], 614). An exception was
especially granted when the confession was "corroborated by an ordeal as
well as by the production of the corpus delicti," (Ze'ev Falk, Hebrew Law
in Biblical Times [Jerusalem: Wahrmann, 1964], 71), as in the case of Aachan,
who was detected by the casting of lots and whose confession was corroborated
by the finding of the illegal goods under his tent floor.
Thus, one can with reasonable confidence conclude that in the biblical
period the normal two-witness rule could be overridden in the special case of a
self-incriminating confession, if the confession occurred outside of court, or
if God's will was evidenced in the matter by ordeal, lots, or otherwise in the
detection of the offender, and if corroborating physical evidence of the crime
could be produced.
Seantum's self-incriminating confession satisfies all three of these
requirements precisely, and thus his conviction was ensured. His confession was
spontaneous and before trial. The evidence of God's will was supplied through
Nephi's prophecy. Tangible evidence was present in the blood found on Seantum's
cloak. These factors, under biblical law, would override the normal Jewish
concerns about the use of self-incriminating confessions to obtain a
conviction.
Given the complicated and important ancient legal issues presented by the
case of Seantum, it is little wonder that the text makes special note of the
fact that Seantum himself was legitimately "brought to prove that he
himself was the very murderer" (Helaman 9:38). No further evidence was
legally needed to convict him under these circumstances.
Welch’s article, “The Case of An
Unobserved Murder,” was published in Reexploring
the Book of Mormon (1992), 242-44. For further reading see Welch, The Legal Cases in the Book of Mormon
(Brigham Young University Press and the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious
Scholarship, 2008).
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