Report of the trial of Madeleine Smith : before the High Court of Justiciary at Edinburgh, June 30th to July 9th, 1857, for the alleged poisoning of Pierre Émile l'Angelier / by Alexander Forbes Irvine, advocate.

Smith, Madeleine, 1835-1928.

Date:: 1857

Credit: Report of the trial of Madeleine Smith : before the High Court of Justiciary at Edinburgh, June 30th to July 9th, 1857, for the alleged poisoning of Pierre Émile l'Angelier / by Alexander Forbes Irvine, advocate. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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$apparently well-founded suspicions, and may be subjected even to false and groundless charges. You nnist, therefore, keep in view thatwhile on the one hand the criniehas been perpetrated secretly, and no eye has seen the parties at the time, or what passed—on the other hand, you must not allow positive e^•idellce to be supplied by sus- picion, and still less admit of loose presumptions as coming in room of that. You must be satisfied by proper evidence that the parties were together when the poison was said to have been administered, satisfied that there was the purpose to administer poison upon the occasion referred to, that the accused had the poison in her possession, and that it was given and administered upon that particular occa- sion, and in the circumstances set forth in the indictment. That you may have given weight to the remarks made before you by the counsel of the Crown I cannot doixbt, but I think it was unnecessary to urge personal convictions upon you so solemnly, in a case of this kind, for the purpose of getting a verdict of guilty. I am quite sure that, if you are compelled to give a verdict against the ])ri- soner, you can only be made to do so reluctantly, by satisfactory evidence. The duty I have to do in aiding you, as far as I possibly can, to come to a decision is very different from what fell to the lot of either counsel. I have simply to go over the evidence in detail, in case it may not be sufficiently in your recollection, and to make such observations as the e^ddence suggests as proper and fitting for your as- sistance ; but what I want to impress upon your minds is, that what- CA'er doubt you may have of the matters set forth in her defence, you must have evidence against her, satisfactory and convincing to your minds, in which you find no conjectures, but only iiTesistible and just inferences. I wish you to keep in view that altliougli you may not be satisfied with any of the theories that had been propouml- ed on behalf of the prisoner—though you may not be inclined to adopt the notion cither that L'xVngelier was the man taking laudanum twice over in tlie course of the journey to Glasgow, or that he took arsenic himself, or belie\e Miss Smith's statement of the use for which she got arsenic—still, nevertheless, thougli all these matters may fail in her defence, the case for the prosecution may be radically defective in e^•idence. I own there are some tilings which have been intro- duced into the evidence on the part of the prisoner—very naturally, perhaps, as it is very right to investigate everything regarding this man li'Angclier and his journey to Glasgow on 22d March—which, I think, cannot aid the prisoner in any degree. You nnist judge of that before you can arrive at tlie conclusion that on Sunday the 22d of jNIarch she did actually administer the ])oison. His Lordship then entered u[)on a summary of the evidence elicited in the course of the trial, reading co])ious extracts from his notes to the .lury. After the evidence of Sheriff Smith and his clerk Gray, who spoke to the ]n'isoner's declaration having been taken down in the re- gular way, after due warning had been given her of the position in which .>he stood, came the de|io.>ili(ins of the most important w itness iu$