Mr. ATTORNEY-GENERAL--May it please your lordships--Gentlemen of the jury, the case for the prosecution and the case for the defence are now before you; and it becomes my duty to address to you such observations upon the whole of the materials, upon which your judgment is to be founded, as suggest themselves to my mind. I have a solemn and an important duty to perform. I wish that I could have answered the appeal made to me the other day by my learned friend, Mr. Serjeant Shee, and have felt that I was satisfied with the case that he submitted to you on the part of the defence. But, standing here as the instrument of public justice, I feel that I should be wanting in the duty that I have to perform if I did not ask at your hands for a verdict of guilty against the accused. I approach the consideration of the case in what, I hope, I may term a spirit of fairness, of moderation, and of truth. My business is to convince you, if I can, by facts and legitimate argument, of the prisoner’s guilt. If I cannot establish it to your satisfaction, no man will rejoice more than I shall in the verdict that you will pronounce of not guilty.
Gentlemen, in the vast mass of materials which the evidence in this case has brought before you, two main questions present themselves prominently for your consideration--- did the deceased man, into whose death we are now inquiring, die a natural death, or was he taken off by the foul means of poison? And if the latter proposition be sanctioned by your approbation, then comes the important--if possible the still more important--question of whether the prisoner at the bar was the author of his death? I will proceed at once without further observation to the discussion of those questions, taking them in the order in which I have proposed them. Did John Parsons Cook die by poison? I assert and maintain the affirmative of that proposition. The case which is submitted to you on behalf of the Crown is this, that having been first practised upon by antimony, he was at last killed by strychnia; and the proposition which I have to establish is that the death of the deceased was occasioned by that poison. The first question, with a view of seeing what is the conclusion at which we shall arrive upon that point, is, what was the immediate and proximate cause of his death? The witnesses for the prosecution have told you one and all that he died, in their judgment, of tetanus, which signifies a spasmodic convulsive action of the muscles of the body. Can there be any doubt that that opinion is correct? Of course, it does not follow that because he died from tetanus it must be tetanus from strychnia; that is a matter for after consideration; but inasmuch as strychnia produces death by