Justice Stephen’s Biased Charge
The charge of Mr. Justice Stephen to the jury positively teemed with misstatements as to the evidence given during the trial. I quote a statement from the same journal in its issue of August 17, 1900:
“I should be very sorry to think that the same number of errors as to the matters of fact given in the evidence had ever been made in any judge’s charge. It simply swarms with them, and as the jury at the end of a long trial is likely to prefer the judge’s résumé to their own recollection, I doubt if the verdict in the Maybrick case was founded on the evidence at all. And if I am right in thinking that the jurors founded their verdict on the judge’s recapitulation of the evidence rather than on the evidence itself, I do not see how any counsel could have saved the prisoner.”
That the jury “did not hear the whole of the evidence very distinctly” is admitted by one of them in the Liverpool Daily Post of August 10, 1889. Consequently they were likely to be unduly influenced by the judge’s charge. There is no evidence that the jury detected the judge’s misstatements, as a more intelligent jury certainly would have done. Their minds were “taken captive” by the charge of Justice Stephen, and they were as “clay in the hands of the potter.”
Lord Russell’s Memorandum Quashed
The Lord Chief Justice sent the Home Secretary a memorandum consisting of twenty folios, in which he stated the strong opinion that “Mrs. Maybrick ought to be released at once.” The Lord Chief Justice also requested that the contents of his memorandum be made public. Yet when asked in the House of Commons to lay the document on the table of the House in order that it might be accessible to the members, the Home Secretary emphatically declined. The London Daily Mail, in a leader on this incident, said:
“The only conceivable reasons for declining to give publicity to the letter, which was actually intended for publication, are apparently official red tape and the fear of giving new life to the agitation in favor of Mrs. Maybrick’s release. This result will be almost as effectually achieved by surrounding the case with further mystery and leaving upon the public mind the grave suspicion that justice may not have been done.”
Repeated Protests of Lord Russell
The following extracts are taken from the “Life of Lord Russell of Killowen” by R. Barry O’Brien.