Introduction
Petitions for a Reprieve
The jury’s verdict of guilty was rendered on August 7, 1889. The evidence at the trial, as well as the learned judge’s “summing up,” was reported almost verbatim in the English press. The result was that, not only in Liverpool, but in almost every city, town, and village of the United Kingdom, men and women of every class and grade of society arrived at the conclusion that the verdict was erroneous—as not founded upon evidence, but upon the biased and misleading summing up of the case by the mentally incompetent judge. Within a few days my lawyers, the Messrs. Cleaver, of Liverpool, who had notified the press that they would supply forms of petition, were inundated with applications. For the first two days they issued one thousand a day, and I have been informed that no less than five thousand petitions for a reprieve, representing nearly half a million signatures, were sent to the Home Secretary within the following ten days. In response to these, the Home Office issued to the press the following decision:
“After the fullest consideration, and after taking the best medical and legal advice that could be obtained, the Home Secretary advised Her Majesty to respite the capital punishment of Florence Elizabeth Maybrick and to commute the punishment to penal servitude for life; inasmuch as, although the evidence leads to the conclusion that the prisoner administered and attempted to administer arsenic to her husband with intent to murder him, yet it does not wholly exclude a reasonable doubt whether his death was in fact caused by the administration of arsenic.”
Illogical Position of Home Secretary
Thus it will be seen that the Home Secretary, Mr. Matthews, ignored the important statement of the judge at the trial, when, in giving emphasis to his remarks, he told the jury that: “It is essential to this charge that the man died of arsenic. This question must be the foundation of a judgment unfavorable to the prisoner, that he died of arsenic.” Then Mr. Matthews, on reviewing the evidence given at the trial, finding it impossible to justify the verdict, because the evidence “does not wholly exclude a reasonable doubt whether his [James Maybrick’s] death was in fact caused by the administration of arsenic,” which question was to be the foundation of a judgment unfavorable to me, instead of giving his prisoner the benefit of the reasonable doubt, took it upon himself to apply the spirit of the law and of the constitution, by making use of a wrongful conviction for one offense charged in order to punish me for a different offense for which I had never been tried, but with which he, without any public trial, charged me, viz., “administering and attempting to administer arsenic” to my husband.
New Evidence of Innocence Ignored
These charges, made by Mr. Matthews in 1889, have never been defined; nor has any statement been submitted to me or my legal advisers of the evidence relied on to prove them; nor have I been afforded an opportunity of being heard by counsel in answer to them, nor of pleading anything in reply to them. Had a second trial been granted me, I should have seen the evidence upon which the new charges were made against me, and in open court I could have confronted the witnesses. But Mr. Matthews sentenced me to penal servitude for life (without giving me a chance to defend myself against the charges) which involved nine months’ solitary confinement in my case—in itself a most excessive punishment for the untried and, consequently, unproven charges. He sent me to suffer fourteen and one-half years on suspicion—a suspicion not warranted by any evidence given at the trial. The new evidence, which has been obtained since my conviction, is admitted by all fair-minded persons to be of such a nature that it would satisfy any intelligent jury that I was not only wrongfully found guilty of murder, but was most wrongfully treated by Mr. Matthews. It completely exonerates me from the charge of murder as well as “administering and attempting to administer arsenic.” Since this evidence was published, no one has attempted to justify the conviction or the sentence passed upon me.
Had the jury, instead of finding a verdict of “guilty” of murder, returned a verdict in the same terms as the finding of Mr. Matthews, the judge must have entered it as “not guilty” and discharged me.