The impropriety and total insufficiency of our methods of criminal
prosecutions were very strongly shown by this trial. One member of
the jury could barely write his name, and not more than one or two
of them were in the lowest sense of the term educated; no record of
the testimony was kept by the court, and none, except in the very
beginning, by the jury, who must therefore have been guided chiefly
by impressions, lawyers' speeches or newspaper records; the feeling
amongst the populace, with whom the jurymen freely mingled, was so
bitter that one of the experts was barred out of his lodgings at
ten o'clock at night, openly because he was for the defence of Mrs.
Wharton; the newspaper which circulated most largely in the place
misrepresented the testimony, and devoted its columns to scurrilous
attacks upon the integrity and professional ability of the medical
witnesses for the defence. Yet under these influences, mazed and
confused by the subtleties and partial statements of the lawyers,
these twelve honest but ignorant men were called upon to decide
between physicians offering precisely opposite opinions. It is well
when this so-called administration of justice ends as a monstrous
farce and not as a tragedy.

The conduct of the Wharton-Van Ness trial would have been far
different if the expert testimony had been what it ought to have
been. If the excretions of Mr. Van Ness had been put in the hands of
a properly-qualified chemist, by finding the metal antimony or by
proving its absence he would at once have settled the case. As it
is, there is no proper evidence of the guilt of Mrs. Wharton. The
probabilities are in favor of her innocence, because the symptoms were
certainly widely divergent from those induced by poison, if not, as I
believe, absolutely incompatible with poisoning. The medical gentlemen
who attended Mr. Van Ness, by destroying all the evidence, have made