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
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.
7/50 (page 7)
![as presumptive proof of such a prodigy, next comes the evidence for the defence, always listened to with suspicion and incredulity, and often impossible to be had. The prosecutor’s address follows, presenting a burlesque on justice alike unprecedented and revolting. Not content with the enormous preponderance of advantage he already possesses, he grasps im- mediately at more. Having befooled himself by allowing his susceptibility of the horrible to unsettle his own judgment, he does his utmost to make others equally befool themselves, by forgetting that they are no longer children met round a nursery fire to listen to stories from Mother Bunch, but grown men solemnly convened in a court of justice in a case of life and > death. That prepossession on the part of the public, the malignity of which was shown by all the lying rumours afloat being to the prejudice of the accused, he adopts himself, clothes in solemn and exciting language, and endeavours to make the jury adopt as a matter of duty to God and man. And this character of eager and interested accuser he maintains throughout—so thoroughly self-satisfied in his own conviction that neither its own enormous improbability, nor the flagrant violations of the rules of evidence it compels him to make, and the minor incredibilities it compels him to swallow, disconcert him in the least. How this dark stain on the criminal jurisdiction of Scotland may be wiped off, this frightful wrong to a young woman and a whole family remedied, but by placing the pro- Isecutor himself at the bar, it is not easy to say. Who, it may be pleaded, but the coryphoeus of the public in this work of slander, should suffer as the scape-goat of the public in the retribution it so richly deserves] Meanwhile, he was but one of many offenders. His chief offence has been his allowing himself to be the dupe of a mischievous and malignant credulity, in circumstances that called for the special exercise of a cool, steady, imperturbable judgment. If any reader shall allege that I am here guilty of the very injustice with which I am charging one of my country’s institutions and those who conduct them, let him mark at how early a stage the hugely improbable surmise of a murder committed by a young woman of one-and-twenty, was seriously taken up, and the letter by which the deceased was supposed to have been lured to his fate, brought in as a clue to farther investigation. Let him mark how the ends of justice were sought to be attained, not by an investigation into the causes of death, terminating, as a dernier resort, an inevitable necessity, in the committal of the accused, but in surmises of her guilt being allowed to run at once into an elaborate and expensive effort to convict her of murder. As if this were either a just or a natural course! As if her life and character were utterly beneath regard! As if the law officers of the crown were officially bound, not to defend people from jeopardy, but to drag them into it! As if murders by young ladies just out of their teens were so common a mode of extrication from difficult dilemmas, that the public prosecutor must, forsooth, interfere, revealing secrets and exposing confidential letters with a harrowing officiousness, and trying a case in which numbers of the most intelligent members of the community pronounce the charge he has sought to establish utterly incredible, while the opinion is all but universal that it is not proved. Am I wrong in denouncing as an insult to common sense this hastening at once, not only without exhausting the investigation of all the more innocent and](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b28269482_0009.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
