We may here observe that the prisoner listened with deep attention to the whole of the address of the Attorney-General, and even with, an air of considerable anxiety, although he still preserved his usual perfect self-possession.
ELEVENTH DAY, May 26.
The proceedings in this protracted case were resumed this morning at the Old Bailey. The public interest which it has excited from the first appears in no degree to have abated, and the Court was again densely crowded. The prisoner was placed at the bar punctually at 10 o’clock, and we were unable to trace any change in his appearance or demeanour, although he naturally listened with marked attention, in which one might occasionally detect a shade of anxiety, to the summing up of the Lord Chief Justice. Still it must be admitted that he looked as little concerned as any one in Court.
Several persons of distinction were present during portions of the day, and among them we noticed Mr. Gladstone, M.P., General Fox, Mr. Milnes Gaskell, M.P., Mr. C. Forster, M.P., Mr. Oliveira, M.P., Lord G. Lennox, M.P., the Recorder, the Common Serjeant, Alderman Sir R. W. Garden, the Sheriffs, and other gentlemen officially connected with the administration of justice in the city.
SUMMING-UP OF THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE.
Silence having been proclaimed,
The Lord Chief Justice (Campbell) proceeded to sum up the case to the jury; but spoke in so low a tone that some part of his address was not audible in the reporters’ inconvenient box. He said,—Gentlemen of the Jury, we have at length arrived at that stage in this solemn and important case when it becomes the duty of the Judge to explain to you the nature of the charge brought against the prisoner, and the questions and considerations upon which your verdict ought to be given. Gentlemen, I must begin by conjuring you to banish from your minds all that you may have heard before the prisoner was placed in that dock. 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 to answer was 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 might take place at the Central Criminal Court; and 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 be held in this Court, so as to secure to the prisoner that he shall have a fair and impartial trial.
Gentlemen, I must not only warn you against being influenced by what you have before heard, but I must also warn you not to be influenced by anything but by the evidence which has been laid before you with respect to the particular charge for which the prisoner is now arraigned. It is necessary that I should so warn you in this case, because the evidence certainly implicates the prisoner in transactions of another description which are very discreditable. It appears that he has forged a great many bills of exchange, and that he had entered upon transactions which were not of a creditable nature. Those transactions, however, must be excluded from your consideration altogether. By the practice in foreign countries it is allowed to raise a probability of the prisoner having committed the crime with which he is charged by proving that he has committed other offences—by showing that he is an immoral man, and that he is not unlikely, therefore, to have committed the offence with which he is charged. That is not the case in this country. You must presume that a man is innocent until his guilt be established, and his guilt can only be established by evidence directly criminating him on the charge for which he is tried. Gentlemen, it gives me great satisfaction that this case has been so fully laid before you. Everything has been done that could have been accomplished for the purpose of assisting the jury in arriving at a right conclusion. The prosecution has been taken up by the Government, so that justice may be duly administered, the Attorney-General, who is the first law officer of the Crown, having conducted it in his capacity of a minister of justice. The prisoner also appears to have had ample means for conducting his defence; witnesses have very properly been brought from all parts of the kingdom to give you the benefit of their information; and he has had the advantage of having his case conducted by one of the most distinguished advocates of the English bar. Gentlemen, I must strongly recommend to you to attend to everything that fell from that advocate, so eloquently, so ably, and so impressively. You are to judge, however, of the guilt or innocence of the prisoner from the evidence, and not from the speeches of counsel, however able or eloquent those speeches may be. When a counsel tells you that he believes his client to be innocent, remember that that is analogous to the mere form by which a prisoner pleads “Not Guilty.” It goes for nothing more; and the most inconvenient consequences must follow from regarding it in any other light.
I will now say a few words in order to call to your minds what are the allegations in this case on 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 the poison of strychnia, and that his symptoms were the symptoms of poisoning by strychnia. Then it is alleged that the prisoner at the bar had a motive for making away with the deceased, that he had an opportunity of administering poison, that suspicion could fall upon no one else, and that a few days before the time when the poison is supposed to have been administered he had purchased strychnia at two different places. It is also alleged by the prosecution that his conduct during that transaction, and after it, was that of a guilty and not of an innocent man. The prisoner at the bar, on the other hand, puts forward these allegations—that he had no interest in procuring the death of John Parsons Cook, but, on the contrary, that it was his interest to keep him alive; that the death was not occasioned by strychnia, but by natural disease, and that the symptoms were those of natural disease, and were by no means consistent with, the supposition of death by strychnia. These are the allegations which are urged upon one side and the other, and it is for you to say, upon the evidence, which, of these allegations you believe to be founded on truth.