THE existing Criminal Law has been found in trials for Murder, to be so
exceedingly hasty, unfair, and oppressive—in a word, to be so very
objectionable to the amiable persons accused of that thoughtless act—that
it is, we understand, the intention of the Government to bring in a Bill
for its amendment. We have been favoured with an outline of its probable
provisions.
It will be grounded on the profound principle that the real offender is
the Murdered Person; but for whose obstinate persistency in being
murdered, the interesting fellow-creature to be tried could not have got
into trouble.
Its leading enactments may be expected to resolve themselves under the
following heads:
1. There shall be no judge. Strong representations have been made by
highly popular culprits that the presence of this obtrusive character is
prejudicial to their best interests. The Court will be composed of a
political gentleman, sitting in a secluded room commanding a view of St.
James’s Park, who has already more to do than any human creature can, by
any stretch of the human imagination, be supposed capable of doing.
2. The jury to consist of Five Thousand Five Hundred and Fifty-five
Volunteers.
3. The jury to be strictly prohibited from seeing either the accused or
the witnesses. They are not to be sworn. They are on no account to hear
the evidence. They are to receive it, or such representations of it, as
may happen to fall in their way; and they will constantly write letters
about it to all the Papers.
4. Supposing the trial to be a trial for Murder by poisoning, and
supposing the hypothetical case, or the evidence, for the prosecution to
charge the administration of two poisons, say Arsenic and Antimony; and
supposing the taint of Arsenic in the body to be possible but not
probable, and the presence of Antimony in the body, to be an absolute
certainty; it will then become the duty of the jury to confine their
attention solely to the Arsenic, and entirely to dismiss the Antimony
from their minds.
5. The symptoms preceding the death of the real offender (or Murdered
Person) being described in evidence by medical practitioners who saw
them, other medical practitioners who never saw them shall be required to
state whether they are inconsistent with certain known diseases—but,
_they shall never be asked whether they are not exactly consistent with
the administration of Poison_. To illustrate this enactment in the
proposed Bill by a case:—A raging mad dog is seen to run into the house
where Z lives alone, foaming at the mouth. Z and the mad dog are for
some time left together in that house under proved circumstances,
irresistibly leading to the conclusion that Z has been bitten by the dog.
Z is afterwards found lying on his bed in a state of hydrophobia, and
with the marks of the dog’s teeth. Now, the symptoms of that disease
being identical with those of another disease called Tetanus, which might
supervene on Z’s running a rusty nail into a certain part of his foot,
medical practitioners who never saw Z, shall bear testimony to that
abstract fact, and it shall then be incumbent on the Registrar-General to
certify that Z died of a rusty nail.
It is hoped that these alterations in the present mode of procedure will
not only be quite satisfactory to the accused person (which is the first
great consideration), but will also tend, in a tolerable degree, to the
welfare and safety of society. For it is not sought in this moderate and
prudent measure to be wholly denied that it is an inconvenience to
Society to be poisoned overmuch.