What says my learned friend? He says that Newton does not speak the truth--first, because he did not come forward till the last minute; and, secondly, because he lays the time of his communication with the prisoner, and affording him the strychnia, at nine o’clock, and the prisoner was not in Rugeley until ten.
Now, in the first place, I must remark upon this that the young man does not say nine o’clock. He says, “about nine,” and every one knows how easy it is to make a mistake as to time with reference to half an hour or three-quarters of an hour, or even an hour, when your attention is not till perhaps a week or a fortnight or three weeks afterwards called to a particular circumstance. A man may be sitting working in his study or his surgery, and have no clock before him, and have nothing particular to impress upon his mind the precise hour of time at which a certain transaction took place; and to say afterwards, when he comes to speak to it under the sanction of an oath, that because he makes some slight difference as to the time therefore he must be taken to be speaking untruly, appears to my mind a most untenable and unsatisfactory argument. It is due to my learned friend to say that he has sought to meet this part of the case. He has produced to-day a witness of whom all I can say is this, that I implore you, for the sake of justice, not to allow the man who stands at the bar to be prejudiced by the evidence of that most discreditable and unworthy witness who has been called to-day on his behalf. I say that not to one word which that man has uttered will you attach the slightest value. Before I come to him, however, I must make this remark--that, if Newton could not be mistaken as to the time, how is it possible that the prisoner could be mistaken as to the time? Yet he clearly was. He told Dr. Bamford (and we have it from Dr. Bamford himself) the next morning that he visited Cook between nine and ten o’clock the night before. And now there comes a witness who tells us that it was a quarter past ten that he had with him alighted from the car that brought them from Stafford, and he could not till after that have gone to visit Cook. My learned friend reminds me that it was ten minutes past ten. Then he had to go to Cook. One of the maid-servants, Lavinia Barnes, like every other witness, may be mistaken; but she asserts that on that night, the Monday evening, Mr. Palmer came to the hotel, and went to see Mr. Cook before nine o’clock. It is clear that she must have been mistaken. It is clear that he could not have been there much before ten. I am told that they get over in about an hour. There was a carriage waiting for him, and he would come over to Rugeley with as much rapidity as he could, which would not be before ten o’clock. As to the fact of the witness pretending that he saw him alight from the car, and that he went to Cook and stayed a certain time so as to cover the whole evening, I ask you not to believe a single word, and I do so because in my heart I do not believe a single word of it.