Justice Stephen’s Biased Charge
The charge of Mr. Justice Stephen to the jury positively teemed with misstatements as to the evidence given during the trial. I quote a statement from the same journal in its issue of August 17, 1900:
“I should be very sorry to think that the same number of errors as to the matters of fact given in the evidence had ever been made in any judge’s charge. It simply swarms with them, and as the jury at the end of a long trial is likely to prefer the judge’s résumé to their own recollection, I doubt if the verdict in the Maybrick case was founded on the evidence at all. And if I am right in thinking that the jurors founded their verdict on the judge’s recapitulation of the evidence rather than on the evidence itself, I do not see how any counsel could have saved the prisoner.”
That the jury “did not hear the whole of the evidence very distinctly” is admitted by one of them in the Liverpool Daily Post of August 10, 1889. Consequently they were likely to be unduly influenced by the judge’s charge. There is no evidence that the jury detected the judge’s misstatements, as a more intelligent jury certainly would have done. Their minds were “taken captive” by the charge of Justice Stephen, and they were as “clay in the hands of the potter.”