consciousness continue?--As long as one can make an observation upon it,
it remains. When the animal is in a state of strong universal spasm it
is impossible to make any observation on its consciousness. The heart of
a human subject killed by strychnia has sometimes blood in it and
sometimes not. Whether the heart contains blood or not depends upon the
particular mode of death, or the dose varying. Spasms of the heart would
expel the blood.
Where death has taken place from strychnia I should not expect to find
it where the quantity taken is small, but where there is a considerable
excess over the quantity necessary to destroy life by absorption I
should expect to find it. Colouring tests are, I think, uncertain in
some respects. Vegetable poisons are generally more difficult to detect.
There is one I know for which there is no test I know of. The stomach
that was sent to Dr. Taylor to operate upon, from the description that
he gave of it to-day, was in a very unsatisfactory condition. If I had
been called upon to analyse such a stomach, I should not have
entertained any reasonable expectation of doing any good with it if I
had not been informed that there was a considerable quantity of
strychnia present. I have no doubt, from the evidence I have heard as to
the Leeds case, the Glasgow case, and the Romsey case, that they were
deaths from strychnia. The symptoms in these cases appear to me very
similar to those of Mr. Cook.
[Sidenote: R. Christison]
Cross-examined by Mr. GROVE--From my own observation, I should say that
animals who die from strychnia die of suffocation--asphyxia; but in
another part of my book which is referred to, I leave the question open.
By asphyxia I mean stopping of the respiration.
Where is it in your book?--It is under the head of nux vomica, at the
bottom of page 898.
I do not find that meets the case?--It leaves the question open; it
takes place through an influence on the heart sometimes, and through an
influence on the respiration; it is now more open, particularly from the
cases which have occurred of death from strychnia.
In the animals poisoned by strychnia that you examined was there blood
in the right cavity?--Yes, in both.
You state in your book, and you tell me that when death does not take
place suddenly in a fit of spasms, the person continues to be affected
for twelve or fourteen hours, with small or milder paroxysms. Is that a
statement which, according to your subsequent knowledge, is correct?--I
have known the effects cease in a shorter time.
You state on page 903, after mentioning a case where the body was rigid,
“the state of rigidity, however, does not invariably occur; on the
contrary, in animals the limbs become very flaccid immediately after
death, but the usual rigidity supervenes at an early period.” I presume
the rigidity of which you speak is the rigidity of death,
rigor-mortis?--Yes.
You have a note--“I have not altered the statement as to this point in a
former edition, yet I strongly suspect that authors who describe the
spasms which produce death, and continue the rigidity after death, must
be inaccurate.” Is that your present opinion?--I think it is very
likely, the interval being very short, that the attention may not have
been attracted to the fact of there having been an interval of
flaccidity. There have been some cases mentioned, very strong
indications certainly, of the spasm having continued from the spasm of
life to what we call spasm of death; but I still think the differences
which are indicated in different cases may be explained on the
supposition that there has been a want of minute and accurate attention.
Now, you mention a case on page 906, where a boy, when he was touched,
was immediately thrown into a fit. Is it your present impression that,
in cases of poisoning by strychnia, there is a tendency to throw the
patient into a fit when touched?--That is the only case. In animals it
is very remarkable; it is not noticed in the generality of cases. I have
been struck with the fact that it has not more often been noted. Dr.
Watson’s book mentions one. It is not that the absence of it is noted,
but that it is not mentioned at all. I have invariably observed it in
animals, unless you touch them very gently indeed.
[Sidenote: R. Christison]
You stated that care was taken in administering strychnia to animals to
administer it to them fasting. Do you think it not likely it would
supervene more quickly if administered to an empty stomach?--Certainly.
If resinous substances were used in a pill, would they not be found in
the stomach on analysis afterwards?--No; if they were not acted upon
they might pass into the intestines and be carried off.
Then the strychnia would be discharged with them, would it
not?--Certainly, or gradually acted upon with the resinous substances.
I suppose if the resinous substances prevented the poison acting
rapidly, it would prevent its absorption into the blood?--For a time.
If so, the more likely to leave portions of it in the stomach or
intestines as the case may be?--The more likely.
Re-examined by the ATTORNEY-GENERAL--Would that materially depend on the
quantity of the dose?--Both on the dose and on the time during which the
pill was allowed to remain. It appears that colour tests are not to be
relied upon in the case of strychnia in an impure condition. In the
first place, you may not find indications of strychnia, and secondly,
they are subject to fallacy, even if the strychnia is pure, from other
substances not containing strychnia presenting similar appearances.
The Court then adjourned.
Sixth Day, Tuesday, 20th May, 1856.
The Court met at ten o’clock.
[Sidenote: John Jackson]
Dr. JOHN JACKSON, examined by Mr. JAMES--I am a member of the College of
Physicians. I have been in practice for twenty-five years in India, and
have seen cases of idiopathic and traumatic tetanus. Idiopathic is more
common in India than in this country. I have seen not less than forty
cases. It is common with children. In children there is a more marked
symptom of lockjaw, but in adults there is no difference between the
symptoms of idiopathic and traumatic. I have always seen idiopathic
tetanus preceded by a peculiar expression of the countenance, stiffness
in the muscles of the throat and of the jaw. In infants it will kill in
forty-eight hours; in adults, arising from cold, it is of longer
duration, and may continue many days, going through the same grades as
the traumatic form.
Cross-examined by Mr. SERJEANT SHEE--The patient always appears
uncomfortable for some time before the attack comes on. His appetite and
desire for food are not much affected. He may take his food as usual
within twelve hours of the preliminary symptoms.
During the twelve hours, supposing the attack to be the first one under
which he suffers, does he seem not to relish his ordinary food?--His
attention is more directed to the stiffness of his mouth and the
stiffness of his neck.
You said to within twelve hours of the attack he relishes his food as if
no attack was impending, but does he not appear less desirous of food
and less inclined to eat it?--I have never heard that complaint.
Re-examined by the ATTORNEY-GENERAL--What interval has occurred in those
cases that have come under your attention between the preliminary
symptoms and the tetanic convulsions?--In an infant, not more than
twelve hours, and in an adult, from twelve to twenty-four hours;
sometimes more than that.
And from the commencement of the tetanic convulsions to death, what
time?--That will vary; three days to ten days; it may take place early
sometimes, perhaps in two days, but that is early.
Does that apply to traumatic as well as to idiopathic tetanus?--They are
both alike, when the disease sets in, as regards the course of the
symptoms.
Are the symptoms more or less severe in India than in this climate?--I
do not see there is any difference; when once set up, the symptoms of
tetanus are the same.
[Sidenote: John Jackson]
In all your experience, did you ever know a case in which the disease
ran its course and ended in death in the space of twenty minutes or half
an hour?--I have never seen it.
* * * * *
[The rest of this day, after Dr. Jackson’s evidence, was occupied with
taking evidence that there was nothing in Palmer’s papers to show joint
transactions between him and Cook; as to Pratt’s and Padwick’s accounts;
as to Palmer’s pecuniary position generally; as to the forgery of his
mother’s name, and the forgery of an endorsement on a cheque for £375 of
Cook’s name, by which he passed into his own account that sum which was
intended for Cook.]
The Court then adjourned.
[Illustration: Mr. Serjeant Shee.]
Seventh Day, Wednesday, 21st May, 1856.
The Court met at ten o’clock.
Speech for the Defence.
[Sidenote: Serjeant Shee]
Mr. SERJEANT SHEE--May it please your lordships, gentlemen of the
jury--I should pity the man who could rise to perform the task which it
is now my duty to attempt unoppressed by an overwhelming sense of
diffidence and of apprehension. Once only before has it fallen to my lot
to defend a fellow-creature upon trial for his life; it is a position,
even if the effort should last but for a day, of a nature to disturb the
coolest temperament and try the strongest nerves; how much more so when,
during six long days, in the eye of my unhappy client, I have been
standing between him and the scaffold; conscious that the least error of
judgment on my part might consign him to a murderer’s doom, and that
through the whole time I have had to breast a storm of public prejudice
such as has never before imperilled the calm administration of justice!
Gentlemen, it is useless for me to conceal what you know perfectly well,
what your utmost endeavours cannot wholly have effaced from your
recollection, that for six long months, under the sanction and upon the
authority of science, an opinion has universally prevailed that the
voice of the blood of John Parsons Cook was crying up unto us from the
ground, and that that cry was met by the whole population under an
impression and conviction of the prisoner’s guilt in a delirium of
horror and indignation by another cry of “blood for blood”! You cannot
have failed to have entered upon the discharge of the duties, which you
have, as I have observed, most conscientiously endeavoured to perform,
without having been to a great extent influenced by that cry; you could
not know that it would be your duty to sit in that box to pass between
the Crown and the prisoner; you may with perfect propriety,
understanding that the facts had been ascertained before a coroner’s
jury, and reading such evidence as was there taken, have formed an
opinion upon the question of the guilt or innocence of the prisoner; but
you cannot but know that whatever that opinion may have been it is your
duty to discard it, at least until you have heard the evidence on both
sides.
[Sidenote: Serjeant Shee]
Gentlemen, the very circumstances under which we meet in this case are
of a character to excite mingled feelings of encouragement and alarm.
Those whose duty it is to watch over the safety of the Queen’s subjects
felt so much apprehension lest the course of justice should be disturbed
by the popular prejudice which had been excited against the prisoner, so
much alarmed that an unjust verdict might in the midst of that popular
prejudice pass against him, that a resolution was taken, not only by the
Queen’s Government and the Legislature, upon the motion of the noble and
learned judge, who presides here, in the House of Lords, that an Act of
Parliament should be passed to prevent the possibility of the ordinary
forms of law being, in the case of William Palmer, made the instrument
of popular vengeance. The Crown, under the advice of its responsible
Ministers, resolved also that this prosecution should not be left in
private hands, but that its own law officer, my learned friend the
Attorney-General, should take upon himself the responsibility of
conducting it properly, at once sternly in his duty to the public and
fairly to the prisoner at the bar; and my learned friend, when that duty
was entrusted to him, did what I must say will, in my opinion, for ever
redound to his honour--he insisted that in a case in which so much
prejudice had been excited all the evidence which it was intended on the
part of the Crown to press against the prisoner should, as soon as he
received it, be communicated to the prisoner’s counsel; everything, I
must say and tell my unhappy client, everything which the constituted
authorities of this land, everything which the Legislature and the law
officers of the Crown could do to secure a fair and impartial trial in
this case, has been done, and the whole responsibility, if unhappily
injustice should on either side be done, now weighs with terrible
pressure upon my lord and upon you.
[Sidenote: Serjeant Shee]
Gentlemen, one great misfortune has befallen the accused--a most able
man who had been selected by him as his counsel many weeks ago has been,
unfortunately, by illness prevented from discharging that duty to him. I
have endeavoured, to the utmost of my ability, to supply his place; I
cannot deny that I am awed--that I am moved--by the task I have
undertaken; but the circumstances to which I have already adverted, the
national effort, so to speak, through the Government of the country, to
ensure a fair trial is a great cause of encouragement, and I am not
dismayed. I have this further cause for not being altogether overcome by
the duty which I have of defending the prisoner and of discussing the
mass of evidence which has been laid before you, that though, of course,
like everybody else, I knew generally and loosely, very loosely indeed,
the history of these transactions at Rugeley, I had formed, when the
papers came into my hands, no opinion upon them, no opinion upon the
guilt or the innocence of the prisoner at the bar, and my mind was
perfectly free to form what I trust will be declared by you a right
judgment in this case. I commence his defence, I say it in all
sincerity, with an entire conviction of his innocence. I believe that
there never was a truer word pronounced than the words which he
pronounced when he said “Not guilty” to this charge. If I fail in
establishing that to your satisfaction I shall be under a great
misgiving that my failure was more attributable to my own ability to do
justice to this case than to any weakness in the case itself; and I will
give you this proof of the sincerity with which I declare upon this
evidence my conviction of his innocence, that I will meet the case of
the prosecution foot to foot at every stage. I will grapple with every
difficulty which has been suggested by my able friend the
Attorney-General. You shall see that I avoid no point because I fail to
approach it, and if you find that I do thus deal fairly with you from
the beginning, and it is my duty to do so, I hope I may be sure, indeed
I know I may be sure, of a willing and considerate attention to an
address which must, I fear, be long, but in which there shall be no
observations, no tone, and no topic of discussion which do not properly
belong to the case.
Gentlemen, the case which the Crown undertakes to establish against the
prisoner at the bar, and to support by entirely circumstantial evidence,
is, or may be, shortly stated thus. They say that the prisoner having in
the second week in November made up his mind that it was his interest to
get rid of John Parsons Cook, deliberately prepared his body for deadly
poison by the slower poison of antimony, and afterwards despatched him
by the deadly poison of strychnia. No jury will convict a man of the
crime thus imputed to the prisoner, unless in the first place it be made
clear that he had some motive for its commission, some strong reason for
desiring the death of Cook; unless, in the second place, the symptoms of
the deceased before death, and the appearance presented by his body
after death, were consistent with the theory of death by strychnia
poison, and inconsistent with the theory of death from other and natural
causes; unless, thirdly, the circumstantial evidence against him is such
as to be inexplicable upon the supposition of his innocence. Now, it is
under these three heads that I intend to discuss the evidence that you
have heard; and it must be plain to you that if I adhere to that order
and method of treating the vast amount of proof which has been laid
before you, I must exhaust the whole argument, and leave myself no
chance without immediate detection of evading any difficulty in the
defence.
[Sidenote: Serjeant Shee]
Before, however, I proceed to grapple in these close quarters with the
case of the Crown, as made by the Attorney-General, allow me, that you
may at once see the whole scope of the address with which I have to
trouble you, to claim its proper place in the discussion for a fact
which, though by no means concealed from you by the Attorney-General,
yet appeared to me in that address by which he at once seized upon your
judgment to have been thrown too much into the shade, the fact that
strychnia was not found in the body of John Parsons Cook. If he died
from the poison of strychnia, he died within two hours of the
administration to him of a very strong dose of it--he died within a
quarter of an hour or twenty minutes of the effects of that dose being
visible in the convulsions of his body; the post-mortem examination took
place within six days of his death--there is not the least reason to
suppose that between the time of the ingestion of the poison, if poison
was taken, and the paroxysm in which he died, there was any dilution of
it in the stomach, or any ejection of it by vomiting. Never, therefore,
were circumstances more favourable; unless the science of chemical
analysis is altogether a failure for detection of the poison of
strychnia, never was there a case in which it ought to have been so easy
to produce it. Now, the fact is, and it is beyond all question, that it
was not found. Whatever we may think of Dr. Alfred Taylor, of his
judgment, and of his discretion, we have no reason to doubt that he is a
skilful analytical chemist--we have not the least reason to suppose, we
know the contrary, that he and Dr. Rees, who assisted him, did not do
all that the science of chemical analysis could enable man to do to
detect the poison of strychnia. They had distinct information from the
executor and near relative of the deceased, either personally or through
his solicitor, that he, for some cause or other, had reason to suspect
the poison of strychnia; they undertook the examination of the stomach,
which, I think, upon the whole evidence, without adverting to that part
of it now in detail, you will be satisfied was not in an unfavourable
condition for a sufficiently accurate analysis, with the expectation
that if strychnia had been taken it would be found, and without any
doubt as to the efficiency of their tests to detect it; and yet in their
letter of the 4th of December they say, “We do not find strychnia,
prussic acid, or any trace of opium; from the contents of the stomach
having been drained away it is impossible to say whether any strychnia
had or had not been given just before death, but it is quite possible
for tartar emetic to destroy life, if given in repeated doses; and, as
far as we can at present form an opinion, in the absence of any natural
cause of death, the deceased may have died from the effects of antimony
in this or some other form.” Having afterwards attended the inquest, and
heard the evidence of Elizabeth Mills and Mr. Jones, of Lutterworth, and
the evidence of a person of the name of Roberts, who spoke to the
purchase of strychnia poison by Palmer on the morning of the Tuesday,
Dr. Taylor came to the conclusion that the pills which were administered
to Cook on the Monday and Tuesday night contained strychnia, and that
Mr. Cook was poisoned by it; and he came to that conclusion, though he
had expressed an opinion in writing that he might--and these are his
very words--have been poisoned by antimony, of which some trace was
found by him in the body, while no trace was found of strychnia.
[Sidenote: Serjeant Shee]