is going to be done with the jar, and objects to its being taken away;
he remonstrates with Dr. Bamford at letting it go away, as if Dr.
Bamford had any interest in the matter, and as if any one would suspect
Dr. Bamford of having had any hand in the taking off of this poor man.
The jar is taken away, and then that occurred which must have made a
painful impression upon all who heard it in this Court--then comes the
story of his going to the post boy, and asking him to upset the carriage
which was conveying those who had possession of the jar to Stafford or
London, for the purpose of its contents being analysed. My learned
friend sought to give a comparatively innocent complexion to this
transaction; he says that this bribe of £10 to upset the carriage arose
simply out of resentment against the officious stepfather who had dared
to interfere in this matter--to insist upon a searching
investigation--he had been guilty, my learned friend says, in return for
the civility, courtesy, and kindness with which he had been treated by
the prisoner, of “prying, meddling, insolent curiosity.” A man who had
seen his poor stepson, to whom he was tenderly attached, lying dead
under circumstances which raised in his mind a suspicion--and I think I
am fully justified, at all events, whatever may be the result of this
inquiry, in saying that the very inquiry we are now upon--the gravity
and importance of it--at least fully justify Mr. Stevens in the
suspicions which he entertained for having insisted upon the inquiry,
and that ought to have protected him against the suggestion of “insolent
curiosity.” It was known that Mr. Stevens insisted upon inquiry--was it
a reasonable motive operating upon this man’s mind that it should
occasion such a sense of resentment and anger that he should desire the
destruction or mutilation of this man, and offer £10 to the post boy to
upset him upon the road? I believe the other to have been the true
version--if you upset him you may break the jar, and then the contents
never could be found, and there would be no danger of strychnia being
discovered.
[Sidenote: Attorney-General]
But it does not stop even there; the inquiry takes place, and the
post-mortem examination having been made, a coroner’s inquest is
insisted upon and becomes inevitable, and then we have the prisoner
seeking to tamper with the administration of a most important office;
sending presents to the coroner at the time the inquest was sitting;
presents, unquestionably, of game and things of that description, and if
the evidence does not very much mislead us a present of money also. For
what purpose was all that done? We find him, with uneasy restlessness,
obtaining through Cheshire information of what is taking place between
the professional man who was employed to analyse the contents of the
stomach and the attorney at Rugeley who was instructed on behalf of Mr.
Stevens; is that the conduct of innocence or of guilt? Why should he be
desirous of knowing whether strychnia, above all other things, should be
found in the intestines of the deceased? Let me call your attention to
the letter which he writes to the coroner--“I am sorry to tell you that
I am still confined to my bed; I do not think it was mentioned at the
inquest yesterday that Cook was taken ill on Sunday and on Monday night
in the same way that he was on Tuesday night when he died; the
chambermaid at the Crown Hotel can prove this; I believe a man of the
name of Fisher is coming down to prove that he received some money at
Shrewsbury; now, here he can only pay Smith £10 out of £41 he owed him.
“Does he tell what had become of the rest of the money that the man had
at Shrewsbury? “Had you not better call Smith,” that is, Mr. Jeremiah
Smith whom we saw here to-day, “to prove this?” What a witness Jeremiah
Smith would have been in the hands of the coroner, Mr. Ward, the
friendly coroner of Staffordshire! And, again, “Whatever Professor
Taylor may say to-morrow, he wrote from London last Tuesday night to
Gardner to say, we (that is, Dr. Taylor and Dr. Rees) have this day
finished our analysis, and find no traces of either strychnia, prussic
acid, or opium; what can beat this from a man like Taylor, if he says
what he has already said of Dr. Harland’s evidence? Mind you, I know it,
I saw in black and white what Taylor said to Gardner; but this is
strictly private and confidential, but it is true. As regards his
betting book, I know nothing of it, and it is of no good to any one”;
the repetition of the same story. “I hope the verdict to-morrow will be
that he died of natural causes, and thus end it”; but the verdict was
not so, and it did not end it; and it is for you to say whether upon a
review of the whole of this evidence you can come to any other
conclusion than that of the prisoner’s guilt. Look at his restless
anxiety; it may possibly, it is true, be compatible with innocence, but
I think on the other hand it must be admitted that it bears strongly the
aspect of guilt; if it stood alone, I would not ask you upon that to
come to a conclusion adverse to the prisoner, but it is one of a series
of things, small perhaps, each individually in themselves, but, taken as
a whole, as I submit to you, leading irresistibly to the conclusion of
the guilt of this man.
[Sidenote: Attorney-General]
Now, gentlemen, the whole case is before you. It will be for you to
determine it. You have, on the one hand, a man overwhelmed by a pressure
almost unparalleled and unexampled of pecuniary liabilities which he is
utterly unable to meet involving the penalties of the law, which must
bring disaster and ruin upon him. His only mode of averting those
consequences is by obtaining money; and, under those circumstances, with
a bad man, a small amount, if that amount will meet the exigencies of
the moment and avert the impending catastrophe and ruin, will operate
with immense power. Then you find that he has access to the bedside of
the man whose death we are now inquiring into; that he has the means of
administering poison to him, and you find that, within eight-and-forty
hours, he has twice acquired possession of the very poison, the traces
of which are found in the death, and after the death; and then you have
the death itself in its terrible and revolting circumstances, all of
which are characteristic only of death by that poison and of no other.
You have then the fact that, to the uttermost of his ability, he
realises the purpose for which it is suggested to you the death was
accomplished. You have all those facts, and the undoubted and undisputed
fact, that a subsidiary poison was also used, of which traces have been
found in the man’s body, although no traces may have been found, for the
reasons and from the causes I have suggested, of the principal poison,
whose possession by the prisoner we have traced, and whose presence we
show in the symptoms which accompanied the death of the deceased. It is
for you to take all those circumstances into your consideration.
Gentlemen, you have, indeed, had introduced into this case one other
element which I own I think would have been better omitted. You have had
from my learned friend the unusual, and I think I may say unprecedented,
assurance of his conviction of his client’s innocence.
Mr. SERJEANT SHEE--Not unprecedented.
[Sidenote: Attorney-General]
The ATTORNEY-GENERAL--I can only say I think it would have been better
if my learned friend had abstained from so strange a declaration. What
would he think of me if, imitating his example, I at this moment stated
to you, upon my “honour,” as he did, what is my internal conviction from
a conscientious consideration of this case. The best reproof which I can
administer to my learned friend is to abstain from imitating so
dangerous an example. My learned friend in that address, of which we all
admired the power and ability, also adopted a course sometimes resorted
to by advocates, but which I cannot help thinking is more or less an
insult to a jury, the endeavouring to intimidate them by the fear of
their own consciences and the fear of the country’s opinion from
discharging firmly and honestly the great and solemn duty which you have
to perform upon this occasion. My learned friend told you if your
verdict should be “Guilty,” one day or other the innocence of the
prisoner would be made manifest, and you would never cease to repent
the verdict you had given. If my learned friend was sincere in that--and
I know he was--there is no man in whom the spirit of truth and honour is
more keenly alive--he said what he believed; but all I can say in answer
is, that it shows how when a man enters with a bias upon his mind upon
the consideration of a subject he is led into error; and when my learned
friend said that he had entered upon this case with an unbiassed and an
unprejudiced mind, who could have failed to feel that never in anything
could he have been more deceived than in thinking that? For who that has
to give his best energies to a defence upon such a charge as this would
not shrink in his own mind from the conclusion that he was to advocate
the cause of one whom he believed to have been guilty of the foulest of
all imaginable crimes? I say, therefore, I think my learned friend had
better have abstained from making any observations which involved the
assurance of his own conviction. I say, further, I think he ought, in
justice and in consideration for you, to have abstained from reminding
you or telling you that the voice of the country would not sanction the
verdict which you were about to give. I say nothing of the inconsistency
which is involved in such a statement, coming from one who but a short
hour before had complained in eloquent terms of the universal torrent of
passion and prejudice by which he said his client was oppressed and
borne down. Why, gentlemen, in answer to my learned friend, I have only
to say, pay no regard to the voice of the country, whether it be for
condemnation or acquittal; pay no regard to anything but the internal
voice of your own consciences, and the sense of that duty to God and man
which you are to discharge upon this occasion. Seek no reward, except
the comforting assurance when you shall look back to the events of this
day, that you have discharged to the best of your ability and to the
uttermost of your power the duty that it was yours to perform. If, upon
a review of this whole case, comparing the evidence upon the one side
and upon the other, and weighing it in the even scales of justice, you
can come to a conclusion of the prisoner’s innocence, or even entertain
that fair and reasonable amount of doubt of which the accused is
entitled to the benefit, in God’s name acquit him. But if, on the other
hand, all the facts and all the evidence lead your minds, with
satisfaction to yourselves, to the conclusion of the prisoner’s guilt,
then, but then only, I ask for a verdict of guilty at your hands. For
the protection of the good, and for the repression of the wicked, I ask
for that verdict, by which alone, as it seems to me, the safety of
society can be secured, and the demands, the imperious demands, of
public justice can alone be satisfied.
The Court then adjourned.
Eleventh Day, Monday, 26th May, 1856.
The Court met at ten o’clock.
Charge to the Jury.
[Sidenote: Lord Campbell]
LORD CAMPBELL--Gentlemen of the jury, we have at length arrived at that
stage of these solemn proceedings when it becomes my duty, as the chief
judge presiding in this Court, to explain to you the nature of the
charge brought against the prisoner, and those questions and
considerations upon which your verdict ought to be found. And,
gentlemen, I must begin by conjuring you to banish from your minds all
that you have heard with reference to these proceedings before entering
into that box. There is no doubt that a strong prejudice elsewhere did
prevail against the prisoner at the bar, in the county of Stafford,
where the offence for which he has now to answer is alleged to have been
committed; that prejudice was so strong that the Court of Queen’s Bench
made an order to remove the trial from that county. The prisoner, by his
counsel, expressed a wish that the trial should take place in the
Central Criminal Court. To enable that wish to be accomplished an Act
has been passed by the Legislature authorising the Court of Queen’s
Bench to direct the trial to take place in the Central Criminal Court,
where it was believed and known that the trial would be fair and
impartial. I must not only warn you, gentlemen, against being influenced
by what you may have before heard, but I must likewise warn
you--although I am sure it is an unnecessary caution, but one which it
is my duty to offer--against being improperly influenced by the evidence
that has been laid before you; because there has been evidence which
certainly implicates the prisoner in transactions of a very
discreditable nature. It appears that he had forged a great many bills
of exchange, and that he had entered into transactions not of a
reputable nature. These transactions, however, would have been excluded
from your consideration altogether had it not been necessary to bring
them forward to assist you in arriving at your verdict. By the law and
practice of some countries it is allowed to raise a probability that the
party accused has committed the offence which he has to answer, to show
that he has committed other offences, with a view of showing that he is
an immoral man, and not unlikely to commit other offences, whether of
the same or of a different nature; but the law of England is different,
and, presuming every man to be innocent until his guilt is established,
it allows his guilt to be established only by evidence directly
connected with the charge brought against him.
[Illustration: Lord Chief-Justice Campbell.]
[Sidenote: Lord Campbell]
Gentlemen, it gives me great satisfaction to find that this case has
been so fully laid before you. Everything has been done that could be
accomplished for the purpose of assisting the jury in coming to a right
conclusion. The prosecution has been taken up by the Government of the
country, so that justice may be effectively administered. The
Attorney-General, who is the first law officer of the Crown, has
conducted the prosecution as the Minister of Public Justice. Again, I am
much pleased to think that the prisoner appears to have had ample means
to prepare for and conduct his defence. Witnesses very properly have
been brought from all parts of the kingdom to assist in his defence; and
he has had the advantage of having his case conducted by one of the most
distinguished advocates at the English bar. Gentlemen, I most strongly
recommend to you to attend to everything that fell so eloquently, so
ably, and so impressively from that advocate, with the exception of his
own private personal opinion. It is my duty to tell you that that ought
to be no ingredient in your verdict. You are to try the prisoner upon
the evidence before you, according as that evidence may be laid before
you upon the one side and on the other, and by that alone, and not by
any opinion of his advocate. I feel also bound to say that it would have
been better if his advocate had abstained from some of the observations
which he made in his address to you, in which he laid great stress upon
his own conviction of the prisoner’s innocence of the crime imputed to
him and of his apprehension that if you returned a verdict of guilty you
one day would have to regret your verdict. The fact of the prisoner
saying “Not guilty” is a mere form; it goes for nothing, and it may lead
to the most disastrous consequences if that formal answer is to be dwelt
upon with too much importance, as it may lead a jury to believe that a
prisoner is not guilty because his advocate expresses his perfect
conviction of his innocence. And, upon the other hand, if the advocate
withholds an opinion, the jury may suppose that he is conscious of his
client’s guilt, whereas it is the duty of the advocate to press his
argument upon the jury, and not his opinion.
[Sidenote: Lord Campbell]
Gentlemen, I will now in a few words give you the allegations upon the
one side and on the other. On the part of the prosecution it is alleged
that the deceased, John Parsons Cook, was first tampered with by
antimony, that he was then killed by strychnia, and that his symptoms
were the symptoms of poison by strychnia. It is then alleged that the
prisoner at the bar had a motive for making away with him; that he had
an opportunity of administering the poison; that suspicion fell upon no
one else; and that on two days, when the poison was supposed to have
been administered, he actually purchased strychnia, the poison
employed; and that, as they allege, his conduct before that transaction,
before the deed, while it was going on, and afterwards, was that of a
guilty, and not of an innocent, man. On the other side it is contended
(and you are to say whether or not truly contended) that the prisoner at
the bar was really the victim of prejudice; that he had no interest in
the death of the deceased; and, on the contrary, that the death of the
deceased was to his prejudice; further, that Cook did not die from
poison by strychnia, but from natural disease; that his symptoms were
those of natural disease, and not of poison by strychnia; and, further,
it is contended that no part of the evidence which has been given shows
anything which is at all consistent with the guilt of the prisoner.
Gentlemen, it is for you to determine between the allegations on the one
side and the other according to the evidence. A most anxious task is
imposed upon you, knowing that the life of the prisoner is at stake;
and, if you find him guilty, he must expiate his crime by an ignominious
death. It is of the last importance that you should be convinced of his
innocence or his guilt; and, if you are not convinced of his guilt, you
will rescue him from the fate with which he is threatened. On the other
hand, when you have heard the statements which were given in
evidence--if you are satisfied of his guilt--it will be your duty to
return a verdict of guilty; for if the poisoner were to escape with
impunity, there would be no safety for mankind, and society would fall
to pieces. Gentlemen, the burthen of proving the guilt rests on the
prosecution; and unless that is fully sustained, and you are not
convinced upon the evidence that he is guilty, then it will be your duty
to acquit the prisoner; but in a case of this kind you cannot expect
that witnesses should be called to state that they saw the deadly poison
administered by the prisoner or mixed up by the prisoner openly before
them. Circumstantial evidence as to that is all that can be reasonably
expected; and if there are a series of circumstances leading to the
conclusion of guilt, then, gentlemen, a verdict of guilty may
satisfactorily be pronounced. With respect to the alleged motive, it is
of great importance to see whether there was a motive for committing
such a crime, or whether there was not, or whether there is an
improbability of its having been committed so strong as not to be
overpowered by positive evidence. But, gentlemen, if there be any motive
which can be assigned, I am bound to tell you that the adequacy of that
motive is of little importance. We know from the experience of criminal
Courts that atrocious crimes of this sort have been committed from very
slight motives, not merely from malice and revenge, but to gain a small
pecuniary advantage and to drive off for a time pressing difficulties.
It seems to me, gentlemen, you will have to consider well whether the
symptoms of Cook’s death are consistent with a poisoning by strychnia.
If they are not, if you believe that death arose from natural causes,
the prisoner is at once entitled to a verdict of not guilty at your
hands; but if those symptoms are consistent with a poisoning by
strychnia, then you will have another and an important question to
consider, whether the evidence which has been adduced is sufficient to
convince you that it was a death by strychnia, and by strychnia which
the prisoner administered. In cases of the sort the evidence has often
been divided into medical and moral evidence, the medical being that of
the scientific men, and the moral the circumstantial facts which are
calculated to prove the truth of the charge against the party accused.
Gentlemen, they cannot be finally separated in the minds of the jury,
because it is by combination of the two species of evidence that their
verdict ought to be found. In this case you will look at the medical
evidence to see whether the deceased, in your opinion, did die by
strychnia or by natural disease; and you will look at what is called the
moral evidence, and consider whether that shows that the prisoner not
only had the opportunity, but that he actually availed himself of that
opportunity, to administer to the deceased the deadly poison of which he
died.
Now, gentlemen, with these preliminary observations I will proceed to
read over to you the evidence which has been given in this long trial;
and I must implore you earnestly that, in any observations I may make
upon its effect, you will be guided only by your own judgment. To assist
you from time to time I may make observations, but you will not be in
the slightest degree influenced by them unless so far as your own
judgment concurs in them. The verdict must be yours, and in your hands
the life of the prisoner must rest.
[His lordship then began with and took the jury through the story of
Palmer’s financial transactions; next the evidence of Cook’s illness at
Shrewsbury; and then that of Elizabeth Mills and Lavinia Barnes, and of
Mr. Jones as to the illness at Rugeley; and passed to the evidence of
Newton.]
[Sidenote: Lord Campbell]
Now, gentlemen, comes a witness of the greatest importance, Charles
Newton. (His lordship read a portion of Mr. Newton’s evidence.) I may
notice to you that Roberts swears, and is, I think, not contradicted,
that he had sold strychnia, among other drugs, to Palmer; and you are
called upon to observe the demeanour of Palmer at that time, and the way
in which he tried to prevent Newton from observing that he had been
obtaining this drug at the shop of Mr. Hawkins. (His lordship then read
a further portion of the evidence of Mr. Newton.) Then the deposition of
Newton was read, and it had better be read again. (The deposition of
Mr. Newton, taken before the coroner, was then read, and his lordship
concluded reading the evidence of the witness.) Now, gentlemen, this is
the evidence of Newton, and most important it is for your consideration.
It certainly must be recollected that he did not mention the furnishing
of the strychnia to Palmer on Monday before the coroner, and that he did
not mention it till the Tuesday morning, when he was coming up here.
That certainly requires consideration at your hands; but then,
gentlemen, you will observe that in his deposition, which has been read
before you, although there is an omission, which is always to be borne
in mind, there is no contradiction of anything that he has said. Well,
then, you are to consider what is the probability of his inventing this
wicked and most abominable lie. He had no ill-will towards the prisoner
at the bar; he had nothing to gain by injuring him, much less by saying
anything to affect his life. I see no motive that Mr. Newton could have
for inventing a lie to take away the life of another person. No
inducement could be held out to him from the Crown; he says himself that
no inducement was held out to him, and that he at last disclosed it from
a sense of justice. If you believe him, certainly the evidence is very
strong against the prisoner at the bar. Now I will take you to the
evidence of the next witness, whose evidence is closely connected with
the witness Newton--who did furnish strychnia to the prisoner--I mean
Joseph Roberts. (The learned judge read the examination-in-chief of Mr.
Roberts.)
[Sidenote: Lord Campbell]