Misdirections to Jury to Draw Illegal Inferences
The judge referred to the Valentine’s meat-juice incident, the most vital point in the trial, in the following extraordinary manner at the end of his summing-up:
“I may say this, however: supposing you find a man dying of arsenic, and it is proved that a person put arsenic in his plate, and if he gives an explanation which you do not consider satisfactory—that is a very strong question to be considered—how far it goes, what its logical value is, I am not prepared to say—I could not say, and unless I had to write my verdict I should not say how I should deal with the verdict; but being no juryman, but only a judge, I can only say this, it is a matter for your serious consideration.”
It is submitted that this was a gross misdirection and a cruel taunt to drive the jury into finding a verdict against the prisoner upon that ground, and it is submitted that so monstrously unfair an utterance can not be found in the reports of any summing-up by any judge in any criminal case. See also another misdirection where the judge read the examination of Nurse Gore and omitted reference to the sample, but said of the bottle, “In point of fact, it remained where it was until taken away by Mr. Michael Maybrick,” when it is in evidence that Nurse Callery had taken a sample of it during the eighteen hours it remained on the washstand, and that others beside Mrs. Maybrick had access to it.
It is submitted that, apart from the question of the identity of the bottle, there was no evidence, except Mrs. Maybrick’s statement, that she had put anything into the bottle, which justified Mr. Justice Stephen in using the words, “He had a small taste of it before it was poisoned,” inasmuch as, except Mrs. Maybrick’s own voluntary statement that she had put a powder into a bottle of meat juice, there was nothing to show that the arsenic, detected by Mr. Davies in the bottle he analyzed, had not been in the bottle when Edwin Maybrick gave it to Nurse Gore and which she opened when she gave the patient “one or two spoonfuls.”
Another misdirection in reference to the meat-juice incident will be found in the summing-up in the words:
“It has a sort of very remote bearing upon the statement which she made on Monday.”
Instead of “a sort of very remote bearing,” it was a matter of the greatest importance that it should be shown that at the very instant she heard that arsenic had been found in some meat juice, before even the inquest, and before any arsenic had been found in the body, she should have attempted to tell Mrs. Briggs that she had put a powder into some meat juice, but did not know what it was; and, in connection with this, the attention of counsel is called to the fact that Mr. Justice Stephen refused to allow evidence showing that she had made this statement from the very first.