brother, will stand before his God; he will have to answer for his life,
and for the sins of his life; he will have to endure that fearful
scrutiny into his past from which even the best of us may well shrink
with terror. But there is one crime for which he will not have to
answer, and that is the crime for which your lordship has convicted him.
My brother, William Palmer, is no murderer. His whole life, his whole
character, his whole bearing at and since the trial are quite convincing
of the fact. From childhood upward no man was gentler of heart; his
charity was inexhaustible; his kindliness to all who were in distress
was well known. To him the wanderer resorted in his afflictions; by him
the poor and houseless were fed and comforted. I write in the face of
the public, with my character as a gentleman and a clergyman at stake,
and I avow only facts that cannot be denied. His liberality was a
proverb, his frank sincerity, his courage, his faithful loyalty to his
friends, his temperance, his performance of the duties of religion, his
social relations in the character of father, husband, and son won for
him the love and confidence of all who approached him; and though it is
true that in one fatal instance he violated the laws of his country, and
subjected himself to a severe penalty for an infringement of its
commercial code, yet this excepted, his was in all respects the very
opposite of that cool, calculating, cowardly, crafty temper which is
essential to the poisoner, and which we know cannot co-exist with these
qualities which my brother possessed from his earliest years down even
to the day when your lordship sent him to his death. My lord, beware,
lest while you convict of murder you are not yourself a party to a
murder! It is not the first time that the annals of our own
jurisprudence have exhibited traces of blood; it is not the first time
that judges have persuaded juries to convict to death on circumstantial
evidence. The records of every country abound in remarkable cases of
persons judicially destroyed for crimes of which they were entirely
innocent. A mistaken resemblance to the actual perpetrator, the fact of
having been seen near the spot where the crime was committed, an
apparent motive of self-interest, a confusion of manner when he was
accused, or some other suspicious circumstance has contributed to bring
the odium of guilt and consequent punishment on the wrong party. At one
time cases of frightful injustice were committed by condemning
individuals for murder when it was not proved that a murder had been
perpetrated. The now well-recognised principle in criminal
law--violated, indeed, by your lordship in my brother’s case--that no
murder can be held as having been committed till the body of the
deceased has been discovered, had, apparently, terminated this form of
legal oppression until your lordship persuaded a jury to find a man
guilty of blood where there was no actual positive proof that a homicide
had at all been perpetrated, and when the chemical analysis had even
demonstrated that it had not. Another, and perhaps one of the most
common causes of prejudice in trials of this nature was the
prevarication or the suspicious conduct of the party charged with the
offence, and this, likewise, your lordship told the jury was proof of my
brother’s guiltiness. Finding himself, though innocent, placed in an
awkward predicament, the accused sometimes invented a plausible story in
his defence, and the deceit being discovered, he was at once presumed to
be in every respect guilty. Sir Matthew Hale mentions a melancholy
instance of this kind. An uncle, who had the bringing up of his niece,
to whom he was heir-at-law, correcting her for some offence, she was
heard to say, “Good uncle, do not kill me!” after which she could not be
found. The uncle was committed on suspicion of having murdered her, and
was admonished by the judge of the assize to find out the child by the
next assizes. Being unable to discover his niece, he brought another
child, dressed like her, and resembling her in person and years; but, on
examination, the fraud was detected, and upon the presumption of guilt
which those circumstances afforded, he was sentenced to be hanged, and
the sentence was executed. The child afterwards reappeared, when of age,
to claim her land. On being beaten by her uncle she had run away, and
had been received by a stranger; a jury, worked upon by suspicion, and
probably also by a judge who pandered then, as judges pander now, to
public prejudice, had thus murdered an innocent man; and that great
Chief-Justice has preserved the fact as a warning for all time to beware
of judgment in cases of life and death. Yet your lordship, who has
succeeded that noble luminary of the law, forgot this memorable case in
the moment when you ought most to have remembered it; though I take upon
myself to say the circumstantial evidence against my brother was not
half as powerful as that against this gentleman whose fate has thus been
commemorated in vain by your lordship’s wise and Christian predecessor
in the judgment seat. Yet do I believe that, as surely as the sun shines
or that God lives in the heavens, there will come a day when my
brother’s innocence will be demonstrated before all men, and though your
lordship may not live to see it, yet will his blood cry out from his
prison grave, and his fate will blacken the memory of all who were
parties to his death with immortal infamy. For it is at your door the
public will lay his conviction--not at that of the jury who were worked
upon to convict, and who would have been more than men if they had
resisted your looks, your gestures, your actions, and your arguments. My
lord, since this conviction of death has been recorded I have seen
William Palmer. I have visited him in his condemned hold. I have beheld
that darling brother, the playmate of my infancy, the companion of my
youthful sports, in whom my heart’s blood circulates, and with whom my
love is entwined. And how did he present himself? And how did he bear
our presence? I say, like Socrates in his cell; I say, like Sidney in
the Tower; I say, like Calas before the wheel. He preserves a cheerful,
an undaunted, an English heart and spirit, and I am proud of him even in
his death doom. Your lordship has not crushed or trampled my brother’s
soul. He maintains his energy and his hope in justice, not indeed from
men, for he was condemned long since, but in the course of events, in
the discoveries of science, in the confession or conviction of those
perjured witnesses against him; or, these all failing, in the God of
truth. Though I never doubted his innocence, yet did I resolve to make
all certain and positive before I hazarded this letter. I fell on my
knees before him. I implored him by our past love and kindred, by our
early recollections and hopes, by our common faith, by all the duties
which he owed to man and God, to disburthen his conscience if he were
guilty, and not to enter before the presence of his Creator with a
falsehood upon his lips. I adjured him to say if he were guilty or not
guilty. Oh, my lord! he did not wince; he did not change his noble
composure; he spoke and looked all innocence. Calmly, earnestly, and
solemnly he answered, and the seriousness of his words went into our
hearts with the fullest persuasion of his perfect guiltlessness of
blood; the most complete reliance on that dying tongue which never spoke
falsely to one of us, but to whose language we listened ever with full
assurance in its integrity and its faith. Under these circumstances,
therefore, I make no apology for addressing your lordship. A great, a
majestic duty is now imposed on you. If you shrink from executing it you
are undone. There are but seven days between this and the irrevocable
hour of death. All your repentance, all your shame will be unavailing if
that dread sentence be rashly carried into effect. I ask you not to
recommend a pardon for my brother--for that, I know, you will not do;
but I ask you--for in you it lies--to obtain a respite for him till his
guilt or innocence be demonstrated to the satisfaction of the world.
Bear in mind that my brother’s counsel offered fearlessly at the trial
that an experiment should be made. Bear in mind that some of the most
able chemical analysts in the world have declared upon their oaths that
if strychnia were administered it can be found; that the
Attorney-General himself, to a certain extent, repudiated Dr. Taylor,
and supported himself by Mr. Herapath’s supposition that strychnia was
there, though Taylor could not find it; bear in mind that Taylor’s
theory of the absorption and decomposition of strychnia was never heard
of until this trial; that it was hit upon by him to bolster up his
credit, and that all the ablest of the chemists at the trial unanimously
repudiated it as a heresy, unworthy of credit, and whose fallacy they
had themselves proved by actual experiment; bear in mind, I say, all
this, and remember with what a harsh and angry denial you refused to
permit such an experiment, though upon it depended the blood of a man. I
say deliberately that if these chemists have sworn the truth, and that
there is no strychnia discernible in Cook’s body, then will William
Palmer be murdered as effectually under the semblance of English law as
ever the most innocent was butchered under the worst forms of the Papal
Inquisition; and that the most fearful responsibility of blood that ever
rested upon human head will be upon those who refuse to concede the test
which is now challenged. I ask that that experiment shall be performed,
which will set at rest for ever the imputation of judicial murder that
will sear your lordship’s character with the present and with the
future; an experiment which may probably clear your soul from the stain
of blood that it must risk if you oppose this application. What is
there unusual, what is there criminal, what is there illegal in
only asking for a respite until it be proved--as it can be proved
incontrovertibly--whether Cook died of strychnia or not? And if he did
not die of strychnia, then is my brother’s innocence made manifest, even
to your satisfaction! While, if it is shown that he did so die, then is
the voice of accusation silent for ever, and the much-vaunted majesty,
the supposed impartiality and purity of English law vindicated in
triumph before mankind. The precise mode in which this experiment might
be made it is not for me to suggest. I have no objection that it shall
be made in any way which may appear satisfactory to the Home Office,
provided only that neither Dr. Taylor nor Dr. Rees is entrusted with its
management. In this pair of worthies I have no confidence. The first
pronounced my brother guilty of poisoning on grounds the most ridiculous
that can be imagined, upon which even a Stafford Grand Jury did not
think there was sufficient to warrant them in finding even a _prima
facie_ case for investigation at the assizes. He wrote letters to the
newspapers branding the accused as a most desperate criminal; he largely
assisted in getting up the prosecution, and was busily engaged all
through the trial in writing notes and making suggestions to the
Attorney-General and the other prosecuting counsel; he smiled
perceptibly when the case was strong against my brother, and could not
conceal his chagrin as it grew weak. As to Rees, he seems to endorse all
that Taylor says, and I have no confidence whatever in him. A writer in
the papers, who is unknown to me, makes a suggestion which you may bring
if you choose before the Home Secretary; but it matters little by whom
the experiment is made so that it is done by an honest man. “If it is
proved,” says the writer, “that Cook died from strychnia, there is no
difficulty in connecting Palmer with the administration of it. But if
that fact is not proved, then the other circumstances do not lead to the
irresistible inference of his guilt.” For the sake of all parties
concerned in the case, for the sake of society at large, and, above all,
for the sake of justice, let that point be set at rest; and let that be
done in this manner--Mr. Herapath says he can detect strychnia wherever
present. Then let there be a certain number of animals killed, some by
strychnia and some by other means; let their interiors be taken out and
put in jars, each separately and numbered, and verified with all the
necessary formalities, Mr. Herapath being kept in the dark as to which
was the poisoned jar and which was not; and if he then can distinguish
between those which contained strychnia and those that did not, let the
Home Secretary have the moral courage to step in and avert the
disgraceful and horrible-to-contemplate possibility of having one day,
in token of his acknowledged innocence, to wave a flag over the grave of
William Palmer, to which he has been consigned upon insufficient
evidence, despite of the revelations of science, and because (to use the
words of Dr. Taylor), “society demands a victim.”
My lord, I have been told by lawyers that all presumptive evidence of
crime should be admitted cautiously, for the law holds that it is better
that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer. And there
is a famous case which so strongly illustrates this noble principle of
the law that I may remind your lordship of it here. The mother and
reputed father of a bastard child were observed to take it to the margin
of the dock in Liverpool, and, after stripping it, to throw it into the
dock. The body of the infant was not afterwards seen, but, as the tide
of the sea flowed and reflowed into and out of the dock, the learned
judge who tried the father and mother for the murder of their child,
observed that it was possible the tide might have carried out the living
infant, and the prisoners were acquitted. The case is mentioned by
Garrow, one of the ablest and purest judges that ever adorned the bench;
and it has been brought before me as illustrative of the wise and
merciful caution which the judges of the past were used to exercise
before they persuaded juries to condemn men who might possibly be
innocent. How your lordship would have decided this trial had it taken
place before you, and had the public Press, under the influence of
insurance societies, hounded on the many to a cry for blood, I can
easily anticipate; but that the great judge who ruled for mercy
adjudicated according to the well-known principles of the Constitution
is what I am assured by every man who has made the English law his
study, and who is too pure to be influenced by a shout of “Crucify him!
crucify him!” will admit without the slightest shadow of a doubt. Take,
again, the ordinary case which I find mentioned in an anonymous letter
in one of the morning papers, and which, I am informed, is so strongly
illustrative of the caution exercised in all criminal cases where the
judge is impartial, and where medical science must occasionally be
fallible, that it needs no words of mine to add to its force. Its value
is increased by this fact, that neither I nor any person connected with
my family has the least knowledge of who the writer is, and, therefore,
no considerations but those which do him honour can be supposed to
operate on his mind.
“To establish,” he says, “a perfect chain of circumstantial evidence,
every circumstance in the case must be proved beyond all cavil. And the
first and most important and absolutely indispensable circumstance in a
case like that of Palmer’s is the fact of a murder having been
committed. That is the groundwork of the circumstantial fabric, without
which the rest of the edifice topples over. It is a circumstance of
which merely the conduct, however suspicious, antecedent or subsequent
to its occurrence, of the alleged murderer furnishes no valid proof. To
convict a man of poisoning, you should distinctly trace the death of the
deceased to poison.
“Take a case in point. It is of frequent occurrence in this country that
a woman is charged with the murder of her newly-born infant. She is
unmarried; she is proved to have been suspected of pregnancy, and to
have denied the fact; she is proved to have been recently delivered of a
child; she has been seen going to a water-closet, and, after she has
left, there are found, rammed down the pipe of that water-closet, the
dissected members of an infant’s body; a knife smeared with blood is
discovered hidden away, and traced to the prisoner’s possession; she has
made no provision for the reception of the child, which, should it
survive the moment of its birth, must prove an incubus upon its mother
and a living witness to her shame. Here are circumstances of a damning
nature. A strong motive, a cool premeditation, a mutilated body, and
physical traces which cannot be mistaken. Mark the result. A surgeon is
called at the trial, and states that he cannot positively swear that the
child was born alive; that it may by possibility have been born dead;
that there being no proof that the child was ever alive, he cannot be
sure that it was killed by being cut in pieces. In that case there is no
Professor Taylor, who, while the case was _pendente lite_, has written
letters in a newspaper stating that ‘society demands a victim,’ and
whose sworn testimony is to the effect that, inasmuch as 99 children in
100 are born alive, his solemn belief is that so was this child, and
that he has therefore come to the conclusion that the cutting off of its
head was the cause of death. There is no Chief Justice to tell the jury
that they are to take all the circumstances surrounding the case into
consideration, and that, although it was not proved beyond a doubt that
death was the result of mortal agency, yet if they arrived at the
conclusion that the prisoner had a strong motive for destroying the
deceased, and had possession of an instrument by which to effect that
purpose, there was a _prima facie_ case made out which would lead them
to the next question, namely, was the state of the body, or was it not,
consistent with the fact of a violent death? There is no infuriated and
Press-prejudiced populace regarding the prisoner as a great criminal,
and thirsting after her blood. No! The judge says to the jury you
cannot, according to the law of the land, whatever your suspicions in
this case may be, find a verdict of guilty; there is no proof of a
murder having been committed, and the prisoner must be acquitted on that
charge. That may be a vicious law, but it is the law, and had no more
right to be violated in the case of William Palmer than in that of any
other individual. If it be, the whole proceedings of the trial are a
mockery and a delusion--a disgraceful pandering to out-of-door
prejudices and a lasting disgrace to this country.”
This is the language of a man who writes as an unprejudiced observer,
and, I am told, with a deep knowledge of the law. If it be, as he says,
that this is the law in cases of this nature, with what face can my
brother be executed when precisely the very reverse was done by your
lordship in his case, and, when forgetting or despising all the
precedents of mercy with which our jurisprudence abounds, you took only
the sanguinary view of the evidence, and enforced everything against the
prisoner by argument, by gesture, and by look.
That the law is wise in exercising this salutary caution I think may be
proved even by the testimony of the actor who next, after your lordship,
had most influence in the verdict against my brother--I mean Dr. Taylor.
In that writer’s work on “Poisons,” page 139, I find the following
statement:--“It often happens, in the hands of the ablest analyst, that
the last steps of a process lead to a result very different from that
which was anticipated at the commencement; and, therefore, a suspicion
derived from a few incipient experiments is very likely to be overthrown
by continuing the investigation. In the Boughton case Dr. Rattray gives
an opinion, in the first instance, that the poison administered to the
deceased was arsenic; but he subsequently attributed death to
laurel-water! A case occurred within my knowledge where arsenic was
pronounced to be present when sulphuric acid was really the poison. In
another case, tried at the Kingston Assizes in 1832, the medical witness
admitted that at the coroner’s inquest he stated the poison to be
arsenic, but by subsequent experiments he found that it was oxalic acid,
and in a case which has but recently occurred the poison was at first
stated to be oxalic acid, but on a more careful examination it was shown
to be arsenic!” Whether or not all the unhappy persons in whose cases
these chemical mistakes were thus made, and thus coolly avowed, suffered
death is not stated, but, as I am told that one of them, Donellan, was
certainly executed, and as it is even now a question deeply involved in
doubt whether the person whom he is supposed to have poisoned was
poisoned at all, and the most able medical authorities incline to the
opinion that he was not, it is likely that the others also were as
ruthlessly sacrificed to what is called “public opinion,” and that they
have been sent to their graves with the stigma of murder when they were,
in fact, but victims to medical delusions, or toxicological mistakes,
which are as coolly confessed by Taylor as if they were merely ordinary
trifles, not affecting in any way the life and death of the wretches
whose interests were at stake.
My lord, how comes it to pass that not one of these most important facts
was mentioned by Taylor at the trial? that his henchman, Rees, who swore
exactly as Taylor swore, did not give the jury the slightest information
upon these questions of vital value to the prisoner? Why were they kept
back from the knowledge of the jury? Why were they concealed from your
lordship? It was proved at the trial that Dr. Harland sent Stevens his
medical notes of the first post-mortem examination; that Stevens handed
them over to Taylor, and that, up to the third day of the trial, Taylor
withheld, even from the knowledge of the Attorney-General and the Crown
solicitor, that he possessed these notes, which contained circumstances
strongly favourable to the case of the prisoner. Was not his silence as
to the medical facts just mentioned of a piece with his suppression of
this material document? Your lordship made no comment to the jury upon
this extraordinary conduct. You severely attacked Mr. Nunneley, you
bitterly censured others of the witnesses for the defence, you weakened,
by all the means within your power, the effect of their evidence when it
told for the prisoner; but not one syllable of censure had you for
Taylor, who kept the jury in ignorance of these facts, and the cases
mentioned by him in his own book, though he was sworn in the language of
the law to tell “the truth and the whole truth.” The whole truth,
indeed, he did not tell; otherwise these matters which I have now quoted
would have come before the jurors, and, as I believe, with all-powerful
influence.
If the wilful suppression of evidence by the prosecution had ended with
Taylor the case would have been infamous enough; the Crown would have
showed that it prosecuted for victory, not for truth, for I take it to
be the unquestioned duty of a prosecutor, more especially when he is
backed by the Crown authorities and the Home Office, not merely to
squabble for a petty triumph on a prisoner charged with murder, or to
attempt to higgle a jury out of an adverse verdict, but to present not a
part but the whole case fairly before the public--the features
favourable to a prisoner as well as those that are unfavourable, the
weak portions of the accusations against him as well as those that are
strong, so that the jury, who are (in theory) his judges, may see and
know every circumstance, however minute, and, from an aggregate of the
whole, come to a right conclusion as to the verdict which they are to
pronounce. But this salutary rule was not followed by the Crown
prosecutors in the present case; they wilfully deceived and misled the
counsel for my brother, and by this trick, which I shall presently
expose, they deprived the prisoner of two of the most material
witnesses, who could prove his innocence, that it was possible for man
to have. The first of these witnesses was a man named Henry Cockayne.
Your lordship remembers the questions which Serjeant Shee put to that
wretched Bates; and you recollect also, I doubt not, the artful way in
which he answered those questions. It was of importance to my brother to
show for what purpose he had purchased, and in what manner he had used,
the strychnia, which he never denied, and does not now mean to deny,
that he bought from Roberts on the Tuesday.