Madeleine [Smith] tried at the bar of common sense and common humanity : being a plea for the coroner's inquest in Scotland / by Historicus [i.e. David Dunbar Scott?.].

  • Historicus.
Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Madeleine [Smith] tried at the bar of common sense and common humanity : being a plea for the coroner's inquest in Scotland / by Historicus [i.e. David Dunbar Scott?.]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    common, and hence more probable possibilities, but without ever seriously commencing it, to what is out of all question the most improbable of those possibilities? Is it less an insult to common humanity to pass over all the innocent possibilities, and adopt one so frightfully damaging to the character of the living; nay, to persevere in it, even after absurdity upon absurdity warns us that we have taken the wrong course? To what a fearful extent this initial injustice colours all that follows, may not only be imagined—it is seen. It is seen, as we have said, in the obliqueness of the whole evidence; in the entire tissue of the prosecutor’s address; most marvellous of all, it is nowhere more seen than in the speech of the eminent counsel who spoke for the accused. Tlfe figure of the panel is met at every turn as an accused or defended criminal. Her guilt or innocence, not the causes of the death of the deceased by arsenic, pre- occupy all minds, and by so pre-oecupying them, quite forbid what was essential to the cause of truth and justice, a full and impartial, a calm and scientific answer to the question—how came this man to die by arsenic? Not a man in court but seems resolved to illustrate the truth expressed by the Banian historian, when noticing this strange propensity of mankind, in the absence of simple, known, natural causes of death, to set their fancies at work, and presume the strange, the mysterious, and the horrible. I repeat, the counsel of the accused did not escape the infection. The man of coolest and clearest intellect at the Scottish bar had his judgment unsettled by it. In his splendid peroration he cannot resign the idea of murder. After having had under his thumb the key that best explained the otherwise puzzling fact of a man’s disappearance for five hours im- mediately previous to his return home in the agonies of death by arsenic— five hours during which he was noticed by no policeman, called on no. friend, rung no doctor’s bell, entered no druggist’s shop, disturbed no family—he enters into the full spirit of this mysterious disappearance, and seems to see the dead man’s wraith pointing with lean fingers and ghastly stare at some unknown murderer. In fact, he found himself driven to defend his client by the same sort of excitement that had been employed so unmercifully against her; setting against the horrors of a murder alleged to be committed by her, the still more horrifying picture to the jurymen of another jury met to pronounce upon the guilt of the real murderer, but not until, by their credulity and rashness, they had secured the ignominious execution of an innocent young woman. Murder, murder, nothing would do but murder! The coroner’s incpiest in England, in the rude state in which it has come down from a remote age, may have much to make it unpopular. It may often rudely, and sometimes needlessly, break in upon private life, and lacerate domestic feelings by a rough though honest handling of matters of the nicest delicacy. But one thing it does not do. It is untrue to its proper object if it ever gives an oblique direction to judicial investigation. Its object is not accusation, but inquiry. It seeks evidence of all kinds, from all sides, and from all persons. The evidence sought and the evidence taken is jealously watched by the public eye ; partiality is thus checked at the threshold, and defective, blundering, or partial general evidence, is in- fallibly corrected by the timely publication of all the proceedings. How much the want of this is to be lamented in the case before us, appears from the amount of important evidence supplied by the public press since its