"Its effect upon the witness himself left nothing to be desired from the point of view of the operator. No abbreviation, in fact, can give the effect of it. The witness's efforts to gain time, and his distress as the various answers were extorted from him by degrees, may be faintly traced in the report. His face was covered with sweat, and the papers put into his hands shook and rustled. These papers, it must be admitted, were some of them of a sufficiently agitating character. Mr. Smith had had to confess with great reluctance that he had witnessed the assignment of a policy for £13,000 by Walter to William Palmer, who was suspected, and indeed as good as known, to have been guilty of murdering him; he had had to confess that he wrote to an office to effect an insurance for £10,000 on the life of a groom of Palmer's in receipt of £1 a week as wages; he had been compelled to admit the self-impeachment of having tried, after Walter Palmer's death, to get his widow to give up her claim on the policy. The result was that Lord Campbell, in summing up, asked the jury whether they could believe a man who so disgraced himself, in the witness-box. The jury thought they couldn't, and they didn't. The witness, whose evidence was to the effect that Palmer was not at his victim's bedside, but some miles away, at a time when, on the theory of the prosecution, he was substituting poisonous drugs for the medicine supplied to the sick man by the doctor, was disbelieved. Yet it is nevertheless tolerably certain from other evidence of an unimpeachable kind that Jeremiah Smith was speaking the truth."
The text of the cross-examination that follows is taken from the unabridged edition of the Times' "Report of the Trial of William Palmer," containing the shorthand notes taken from day to day, and published in London in 1856.
Attorney-General. "Are you the gentleman who took Mr. Myatt to Stafford Gaol?"
Smith. "I am."
Attorney-General. "Have you known Palmer long?"
Smith. "I have known him long and very intimately, and have been employed a good deal as an attorney by Palmer and his family."
Attorney-General. "In December, 1854, did he apply to you to attest a proposal of his brother, Walter Palmer, for £13,000 in the Solicitors and General Insurance Office?"
Smith. "I cannot recollect; if you will let me see the document, I will tell you."
Attorney-General. "Will you swear that you were not applied to?"