Misreception of Evidence
Under the head of Misreception of Evidence may be classed the observations of the judge, where, apparently in order to prevent the jury from being influenced in favor of the prisoner, owing to the small quantity of arsenic found in the body of the deceased, he mentioned an instance of a dog being poisoned, in the body of which, though it had taken a large number of grains of arsenic, no arsenic was found after its death. The judge, in other words, turned himself into a witness for the prosecution. The unfairness to the prisoner of such a course is obvious. Had the judge been an ordinary witness he might have been cross-examined to show, e.g., that arsenic passes away from the body of a dog much more quickly than from that of a man, or that the circumstances as to time and quantity taken were such as to prove that there was no analogy between the two cases. As the matter stands, the judge’s recollection of an experiment on a dog, which had been made many years before, was meant to rebut a proposition much relied on by the defense, viz., that the small quantity of arsenic found in the body of the deceased was consistent with the view that he was in the habit of taking arsenic, rather than with the case for the Crown that he had been intentionally poisoned.