On the other hand, if a guilty defendant has been so badly advised as to give his own version of the case before the magistrate in the first instance, it requires but slight assiduity on the part of the district attorney to secure, in the interval between the hearing and the jury trial, ample evidence to rebut it.
As illustrating merely the fertility and resourcefulness of some defendants (or perhaps their counsel), the writer recalls a case which he tried in the year 1902 where the defendant, a druggist, was charged with manslaughter in having caused the death of an infant by filling a doctor's prescription for calomel with morphine. It so happened that two jars containing standard pills had been standing side by side upon an adjacent shelf, and, a prescription for morphine having come in at the same time as that for the calomel, the druggist had carelessly filled the morphine prescription with calomel, and the calomel prescription with morphine. The adult for whom the morphine had been prescribed recovered immediately under the beneficent influence of the calomel, but the baby for whom the calomel had been ordered died from the effects of the first morphine pill administered. All this had occurred in 1897—five years before. The remainder of the pills had disappeared.
Upon the trial (no inconsistent contention having been entered in the police court) the prisoner's counsel introduced six separate defences, to wit: That the prescription had been properly filled with calomel and that the child had died from natural causes, the following being suggested:
1. Acute gastritis.
2. Acute nephritis.
3. Cerebro-spinal meningitis.
4. Fulminating meningitis.
5. That the child had died of apomorphine, a totally distinct poison.
6. That it had received and taken calomel, but that, having eaten a small piece of pickle shortly before, the conjunction of the vegetable acid with the calomel had formed, in the child's stomach, a precipitate of corrosive sublimate, from which it had died.