An innocent man hanged—not the first or the last

Innocent men have perished before James, and are like to keep on perishing (in spite of all our wisdom) till the end of time. . . . He had been hanged by fraud and violence, and the world wagged along, and there was not a pennyweight of difference; and the villains of that horrid plot were decent, kind, respectable fathers of families, who went to kirk and took the sacrament!

Robert Louis Stevenson, Catriona (1892), pt. I, ch. 20