A LETTER TO THE LORD CHIEF-JUSTICE CAMPBELL.
After a struggle with internal emotions too dreadful to be described, amid the tears and lamentations of my family, the bereavement of a household knit together in bonds of strongest love and amity, and the smothered, not wholly-concealed indignation of relatives and friends, I address your lordship, not only as the man who has sealed my brother’s fate and borne him to the foot of the scaffold, but as the judge who will have to render an account to your fellow-men, to posterity, and to God of your dealing towards a human being whose fate was, to a certain extent, placed in your hands, and on whose destiny you operated in a manner hitherto unknown, at least in our days. The law, with bitter irony, propounds it is an axiom dear to Englishmen that a magistrate invested with powers like your lordship is “counsel for the prisoner”; but every man who witnesses the late mockery at the Old Bailey, in which you played so prominent a part, confesses—to his own heart, at least, whatever he may own in public—that a more infamous delusion has never been solemnly enacted before a British audience since those days of shame when Jeffreys went forth upon the “bloody assize,” and, in the name of Justice and the Law, consigned the young, the innocent, the helpless, and the stricken with years to the dungeon and the gallows, professing all the while to be actuated by a sense of duty to the Crown and to the people.
These may appear strong words, and this a heavy accusation, but I will demonstrate it to all who read this letter. What though I may not hope to move your lordship to justice, yet I may, at least, awaken within you a sense of that awful day which approaches you as certainly as it looms on my brother, and which, at your advanced age, cannot be far removed. I may awaken within you a feeling of compunction, or, at all events, of solemn reflection; for you, also, will have to stand before a Judge enthroned in majesty and power; before whom you will be, indeed, as nought; and when upon your brow appears the awful record of your administration of justice to the man whom you have condemned, in that hour also shall you remember this word from the brother of his affections. May it avail you before that terrific moment! May it serve to save yourself from yourself, and to warn you in time that it is the duty of a British judge to hear, not to condemn; to adjudicate, not to execute; to administer the law as the representative of the country, not to pervert it to his own purposes with the anxiety of a hangman.
My lord, in one week—in some short days from this—William Palmer, my brother, will stand before his God; he will have to answer for his life, and for the sins of his life; he will have to endure that fearful scrutiny into his past from which even the best of us may well shrink with terror. But there is one crime for which he will not have to answer, and that is the crime for which your lordship has convicted him. My brother, William Palmer, is no murderer. His whole life, his whole character, his whole bearing at and since the trial are quite convincing of the fact. From childhood upward no man was gentler of heart; his charity was inexhaustible; his kindliness to all who were in distress was well known. To him the wanderer resorted in his afflictions; by him the poor and houseless were fed and comforted. I write in the face of the public, with my character as a gentleman and a clergyman at stake, and I avow only facts that cannot be denied. His liberality was a proverb, his frank sincerity, his courage, his faithful loyalty to his friends, his temperance, his performance of the duties of religion, his social relations in the character of father, husband, and son won for him the love and confidence of all who approached him; and though it is true that in one fatal instance he violated the laws of his country, and subjected himself to a severe penalty for an infringement of its commercial code, yet this excepted, his was in all respects the very opposite of that cool, calculating, cowardly, crafty temper which is essential to the poisoner, and which we know cannot co-exist with these qualities which my brother possessed from his earliest years down even to the day when your lordship sent him to his death. My lord, beware, lest while you convict of murder you are not yourself a party to a murder! It is not the first time that the annals of our own jurisprudence have exhibited traces of blood; it is not the first time that judges have persuaded juries to convict to death on circumstantial evidence. The records of every country abound in remarkable cases of persons judicially destroyed for crimes of which they were entirely innocent. A mistaken resemblance to the actual perpetrator, the fact of having been seen near the spot where the crime was committed, an apparent motive of self-interest, a confusion of manner when he was accused, or some other suspicious circumstance has contributed to bring the odium of guilt and consequent punishment on the wrong party. At one time cases of frightful injustice were committed by condemning individuals for murder when it was not proved that a murder had been perpetrated. The now well-recognised principle in criminal law—violated, indeed, by your lordship in my brother’s case—that no murder can be held as having been committed till the body of the deceased has been discovered, had, apparently, terminated this form of legal oppression until your lordship persuaded a jury to find a man guilty of blood where there was no actual positive proof that a homicide had at all been perpetrated, and when the chemical analysis had even demonstrated that it had not. Another, and perhaps one of the most common causes of prejudice in trials of this nature was the prevarication or the suspicious conduct of the party charged with the offence, and this, likewise, your lordship told the jury was proof of my brother’s guiltiness. Finding himself, though innocent, placed in an awkward predicament, the accused sometimes invented a plausible story in his defence, and the deceit being discovered, he was at once presumed to be in every respect guilty. Sir Matthew Hale mentions a melancholy instance of this kind. An uncle, who had the bringing up of his niece, to whom he was heir-at-law, correcting her for some offence, she was heard to say, “Good uncle, do not kill me!” after which she could not be found. The uncle was committed on suspicion of having murdered her, and was admonished by the judge of the assize to find out the child by the next assizes. Being unable to discover his niece, he brought another child, dressed like her, and resembling her in person and years; but, on examination, the fraud was detected, and upon the presumption of guilt which those circumstances afforded, he was sentenced to be hanged, and the sentence was executed. The child afterwards reappeared, when of age, to claim her land. On being beaten by her uncle she had run away, and had been received by a stranger; a jury, worked upon by suspicion, and probably also by a judge who pandered then, as judges pander now, to public prejudice, had thus murdered an innocent man; and that great Chief-Justice has preserved the fact as a warning for all time to beware of judgment in cases of life and death. Yet your lordship, who has succeeded that noble luminary of the law, forgot this memorable case in the moment when you ought most to have remembered it; though I take upon myself to say the circumstantial evidence against my brother was not half as powerful as that against this gentleman whose fate has thus been commemorated in vain by your lordship’s wise and Christian predecessor in the judgment seat. Yet do I believe that, as surely as the sun shines or that God lives in the heavens, there will come a day when my brother’s innocence will be demonstrated before all men, and though your lordship may not live to see it, yet will his blood cry out from his prison grave, and his fate will blacken the memory of all who were parties to his death with immortal infamy. For it is at your door the public will lay his conviction—not at that of the jury who were worked upon to convict, and who would have been more than men if they had resisted your looks, your gestures, your actions, and your arguments. My lord, since this conviction of death has been recorded I have seen William Palmer. I have visited him in his condemned hold. I have beheld that darling brother, the playmate of my infancy, the companion of my youthful sports, in whom my heart’s blood circulates, and with whom my love is entwined. And how did he present himself? And how did he bear our presence? I say, like Socrates in his cell; I say, like Sidney in the Tower; I say, like Calas before the wheel. He preserves a cheerful, an undaunted, an English heart and spirit, and I am proud of him even in his death doom. Your lordship has not crushed or trampled my brother’s soul. He maintains his energy and his hope in justice, not indeed from men, for he was condemned long since, but in the course of events, in the discoveries of science, in the confession or conviction of those perjured witnesses against him; or, these all failing, in the God of truth. Though I never doubted his innocence, yet did I resolve to make all certain and positive before I hazarded this letter. I fell on my knees before him. I implored him by our past love and kindred, by our early recollections and hopes, by our common faith, by all the duties which he owed to man and God, to disburthen his conscience if he were guilty, and not to enter before the presence of his Creator with a falsehood upon his lips. I adjured him to say if he were guilty or not guilty. Oh, my lord! he did not wince; he did not change his noble composure; he spoke and looked all innocence. Calmly, earnestly, and solemnly he answered, and the seriousness of his words went into our hearts with the fullest persuasion of his perfect guiltlessness of blood; the most complete reliance on that dying tongue which never spoke falsely to one of us, but to whose language we listened ever with full assurance in its integrity and its faith. Under these circumstances, therefore, I make no apology for addressing your lordship. A great, a majestic duty is now imposed on you. If you shrink from executing it you are undone. There are but seven days between this and the irrevocable hour of death. All your repentance, all your shame will be unavailing if that dread sentence be rashly carried into effect. I ask you not to recommend a pardon for my brother—for that, I know, you will not do; but I ask you—for in you it lies—to obtain a respite for him till his guilt or innocence be demonstrated to the satisfaction of the world. Bear in mind that my brother’s counsel offered fearlessly at the trial that an experiment should be made. Bear in mind that some of the most able chemical analysts in the world have declared upon their oaths that if strychnia were administered it can be found; that the Attorney-General himself, to a certain extent, repudiated Dr. Taylor, and supported himself by Mr. Herapath’s supposition that strychnia was there, though Taylor could not find it; bear in mind that Taylor’s theory of the absorption and decomposition of strychnia was never heard of until this trial; that it was hit upon by him to bolster up his credit, and that all the ablest of the chemists at the trial unanimously repudiated it as a heresy, unworthy of credit, and whose fallacy they had themselves proved by actual experiment; bear in mind, I say, all this, and remember with what a harsh and angry denial you refused to permit such an experiment, though upon it depended the blood of a man. I say deliberately that if these chemists have sworn the truth, and that there is no strychnia discernible in Cook’s body, then will William Palmer be murdered as effectually under the semblance of English law as ever the most innocent was butchered under the worst forms of the Papal Inquisition; and that the most fearful responsibility of blood that ever rested upon human head will be upon those who refuse to concede the test which is now challenged. I ask that that experiment shall be performed, which will set at rest for ever the imputation of judicial murder that will sear your lordship’s character with the present and with the future; an experiment which may probably clear your soul from the stain of blood that it must risk if you oppose this application. What is there unusual, what is there criminal, what is there illegal in only asking for a respite until it be proved—as it can be proved incontrovertibly—whether Cook died of strychnia or not? And if he did not die of strychnia, then is my brother’s innocence made manifest, even to your satisfaction! While, if it is shown that he did so die, then is the voice of accusation silent for ever, and the much-vaunted majesty, the supposed impartiality and purity of English law vindicated in triumph before mankind. The precise mode in which this experiment might be made it is not for me to suggest. I have no objection that it shall be made in any way which may appear satisfactory to the Home Office, provided only that neither Dr. Taylor nor Dr. Rees is entrusted with its management. In this pair of worthies I have no confidence. The first pronounced my brother guilty of poisoning on grounds the most ridiculous that can be imagined, upon which even a Stafford Grand Jury did not think there was sufficient to warrant them in finding even a prima facie case for investigation at the assizes. He wrote letters to the newspapers branding the accused as a most desperate criminal; he largely assisted in getting up the prosecution, and was busily engaged all through the trial in writing notes and making suggestions to the Attorney-General and the other prosecuting counsel; he smiled perceptibly when the case was strong against my brother, and could not conceal his chagrin as it grew weak. As to Rees, he seems to endorse all that Taylor says, and I have no confidence whatever in him. A writer in the papers, who is unknown to me, makes a suggestion which you may bring if you choose before the Home Secretary; but it matters little by whom the experiment is made so that it is done by an honest man. “If it is proved,” says the writer, “that Cook died from strychnia, there is no difficulty in connecting Palmer with the administration of it. But if that fact is not proved, then the other circumstances do not lead to the irresistible inference of his guilt.” For the sake of all parties concerned in the case, for the sake of society at large, and, above all, for the sake of justice, let that point be set at rest; and let that be done in this manner—Mr. Herapath says he can detect strychnia wherever present. Then let there be a certain number of animals killed, some by strychnia and some by other means; let their interiors be taken out and put in jars, each separately and numbered, and verified with all the necessary formalities, Mr. Herapath being kept in the dark as to which was the poisoned jar and which was not; and if he then can distinguish between those which contained strychnia and those that did not, let the Home Secretary have the moral courage to step in and avert the disgraceful and horrible-to-contemplate possibility of having one day, in token of his acknowledged innocence, to wave a flag over the grave of William Palmer, to which he has been consigned upon insufficient evidence, despite of the revelations of science, and because (to use the words of Dr. Taylor), “society demands a victim.”
My lord, I have been told by lawyers that all presumptive evidence of crime should be admitted cautiously, for the law holds that it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer. And there is a famous case which so strongly illustrates this noble principle of the law that I may remind your lordship of it here. The mother and reputed father of a bastard child were observed to take it to the margin of the dock in Liverpool, and, after stripping it, to throw it into the dock. The body of the infant was not afterwards seen, but, as the tide of the sea flowed and reflowed into and out of the dock, the learned judge who tried the father and mother for the murder of their child, observed that it was possible the tide might have carried out the living infant, and the prisoners were acquitted. The case is mentioned by Garrow, one of the ablest and purest judges that ever adorned the bench; and it has been brought before me as illustrative of the wise and merciful caution which the judges of the past were used to exercise before they persuaded juries to condemn men who might possibly be innocent. How your lordship would have decided this trial had it taken place before you, and had the public Press, under the influence of insurance societies, hounded on the many to a cry for blood, I can easily anticipate; but that the great judge who ruled for mercy adjudicated according to the well-known principles of the Constitution is what I am assured by every man who has made the English law his study, and who is too pure to be influenced by a shout of “Crucify him! crucify him!” will admit without the slightest shadow of a doubt. Take, again, the ordinary case which I find mentioned in an anonymous letter in one of the morning papers, and which, I am informed, is so strongly illustrative of the caution exercised in all criminal cases where the judge is impartial, and where medical science must occasionally be fallible, that it needs no words of mine to add to its force. Its value is increased by this fact, that neither I nor any person connected with my family has the least knowledge of who the writer is, and, therefore, no considerations but those which do him honour can be supposed to operate on his mind.
“To establish,” he says, “a perfect chain of circumstantial evidence, every circumstance in the case must be proved beyond all cavil. And the first and most important and absolutely indispensable circumstance in a case like that of Palmer’s is the fact of a murder having been committed. That is the groundwork of the circumstantial fabric, without which the rest of the edifice topples over. It is a circumstance of which merely the conduct, however suspicious, antecedent or subsequent to its occurrence, of the alleged murderer furnishes no valid proof. To convict a man of poisoning, you should distinctly trace the death of the deceased to poison.
“Take a case in point. It is of frequent occurrence in this country that a woman is charged with the murder of her newly-born infant. She is unmarried; she is proved to have been suspected of pregnancy, and to have denied the fact; she is proved to have been recently delivered of a child; she has been seen going to a water-closet, and, after she has left, there are found, rammed down the pipe of that water-closet, the dissected members of an infant’s body; a knife smeared with blood is discovered hidden away, and traced to the prisoner’s possession; she has made no provision for the reception of the child, which, should it survive the moment of its birth, must prove an incubus upon its mother and a living witness to her shame. Here are circumstances of a damning nature. A strong motive, a cool premeditation, a mutilated body, and physical traces which cannot be mistaken. Mark the result. A surgeon is called at the trial, and states that he cannot positively swear that the child was born alive; that it may by possibility have been born dead; that there being no proof that the child was ever alive, he cannot be sure that it was killed by being cut in pieces. In that case there is no Professor Taylor, who, while the case was pendente lite, has written letters in a newspaper stating that ‘society demands a victim,’ and whose sworn testimony is to the effect that, inasmuch as 99 children in 100 are born alive, his solemn belief is that so was this child, and that he has therefore come to the conclusion that the cutting off of its head was the cause of death. There is no Chief Justice to tell the jury that they are to take all the circumstances surrounding the case into consideration, and that, although it was not proved beyond a doubt that death was the result of mortal agency, yet if they arrived at the conclusion that the prisoner had a strong motive for destroying the deceased, and had possession of an instrument by which to effect that purpose, there was a prima facie case made out which would lead them to the next question, namely, was the state of the body, or was it not, consistent with the fact of a violent death? There is no infuriated and Press-prejudiced populace regarding the prisoner as a great criminal, and thirsting after her blood. No! The judge says to the jury you cannot, according to the law of the land, whatever your suspicions in this case may be, find a verdict of guilty; there is no proof of a murder having been committed, and the prisoner must be acquitted on that charge. That may be a vicious law, but it is the law, and had no more right to be violated in the case of William Palmer than in that of any other individual. If it be, the whole proceedings of the trial are a mockery and a delusion—a disgraceful pandering to out-of-door prejudices and a lasting disgrace to this country.”
This is the language of a man who writes as an unprejudiced observer, and, I am told, with a deep knowledge of the law. If it be, as he says, that this is the law in cases of this nature, with what face can my brother be executed when precisely the very reverse was done by your lordship in his case, and, when forgetting or despising all the precedents of mercy with which our jurisprudence abounds, you took only the sanguinary view of the evidence, and enforced everything against the prisoner by argument, by gesture, and by look.
That the law is wise in exercising this salutary caution I think may be proved even by the testimony of the actor who next, after your lordship, had most influence in the verdict against my brother—I mean Dr. Taylor. In that writer’s work on “Poisons,” page 139, I find the following statement:—“It often happens, in the hands of the ablest analyst, that the last steps of a process lead to a result very different from that which was anticipated at the commencement; and, therefore, a suspicion derived from a few incipient experiments is very likely to be overthrown by continuing the investigation. In the Boughton case Dr. Rattray gives an opinion, in the first instance, that the poison administered to the deceased was arsenic; but he subsequently attributed death to laurel-water! A case occurred within my knowledge where arsenic was pronounced to be present when sulphuric acid was really the poison. In another case, tried at the Kingston Assizes in 1832, the medical witness admitted that at the coroner’s inquest he stated the poison to be arsenic, but by subsequent experiments he found that it was oxalic acid, and in a case which has but recently occurred the poison was at first stated to be oxalic acid, but on a more careful examination it was shown to be arsenic!” Whether or not all the unhappy persons in whose cases these chemical mistakes were thus made, and thus coolly avowed, suffered death is not stated, but, as I am told that one of them, Donellan, was certainly executed, and as it is even now a question deeply involved in doubt whether the person whom he is supposed to have poisoned was poisoned at all, and the most able medical authorities incline to the opinion that he was not, it is likely that the others also were as ruthlessly sacrificed to what is called “public opinion,” and that they have been sent to their graves with the stigma of murder when they were, in fact, but victims to medical delusions, or toxicological mistakes, which are as coolly confessed by Taylor as if they were merely ordinary trifles, not affecting in any way the life and death of the wretches whose interests were at stake.
My lord, how comes it to pass that not one of these most important facts was mentioned by Taylor at the trial? that his henchman, Rees, who swore exactly as Taylor swore, did not give the jury the slightest information upon these questions of vital value to the prisoner? Why were they kept back from the knowledge of the jury? Why were they concealed from your lordship? It was proved at the trial that Dr. Harland sent Stevens his medical notes of the first post-mortem examination; that Stevens handed them over to Taylor, and that, up to the third day of the trial, Taylor withheld, even from the knowledge of the Attorney-General and the Crown solicitor, that he possessed these notes, which contained circumstances strongly favourable to the case of the prisoner. Was not his silence as to the medical facts just mentioned of a piece with his suppression of this material document? Your lordship made no comment to the jury upon this extraordinary conduct. You severely attacked Mr. Nunneley, you bitterly censured others of the witnesses for the defence, you weakened, by all the means within your power, the effect of their evidence when it told for the prisoner; but not one syllable of censure had you for Taylor, who kept the jury in ignorance of these facts, and the cases mentioned by him in his own book, though he was sworn in the language of the law to tell “the truth and the whole truth.” The whole truth, indeed, he did not tell; otherwise these matters which I have now quoted would have come before the jurors, and, as I believe, with all-powerful influence.