The Art of Cross-Examination Part 18

When Buchanan's case came up for trial it was discovered that, although morphine had been found in the stomach, blood, and intestines of his wife's body, the pupils of the eyes were not symmetrically contracted.

No positive diagnosis of her case could be made by the attending physicians until the continued chemical examination of the contents of the body disclosed indisputable evidence of atropine (belladonna).

Buchanan had profited by the disclosures in the Harris trial, but had made the fatal mistake of telling his friends how it could have been done in order to cheat science. It was this statement of his that put the chemists on their guard, and resulted in Buchanan's conviction and subsequent execution.

Carlyle Harris maintained his innocence even after the Court of Appeals had unanimously sustained his conviction, and even as he calmly took his seat in the electric chair.

The most famous English poison case comparable to the Harris and Buchanan cases was that of the celebrated William Palmer, also a physician by profession, who poisoned his companion by the use of strychnine in order to obtain his money and collect his racing bets. The trial is referred to in detail in another chapter.

Palmer, like Harris and Buchanan, maintained a stoical demeanor throughout his trial and confinement in jail, awaiting execution. The morning of his execution he ate his eggs at breakfast as if he were going on a journey. When he was led to the gallows, it was demanded of him in the name of G.o.d, as was the custom in England in those days, if he was innocent or guilty. He made no reply. Again the question was put, "William Palmer, in the name of Almighty G.o.d, are you innocent or guilty?" Just as the white cap came over his face he murmured in a low breath, "Guilty," and the bolts were drawn with a crash.

CHAPTER XIII

THE BELLEVUE HOSPITAL CASE

On December 15, 1900, there appeared in the _New York World_ an article written by Thomas J. Minnock, a newspaper reporter, in which he claimed to have been an eye-witness to the shocking brutality of certain nurses in attendance at the Insane Pavilion of Bellevue Hospital, which resulted in the death, by strangulation, of one of its inmates, a Frenchman named Hilliard. This Frenchman had arrived at the hospital at about four o'clock in the afternoon of Tuesday, December 11. He was suffering from alcoholic mania, but was apparently otherwise in normal physical condition. Twenty-six hours later, or on Wednesday, December 12, he died. An autopsy was performed which disclosed several bruises on the forehead, arm, hand, and shoulder, three broken ribs and a broken hyoid bone in the neck (which supports the tongue), and a suffusion of blood or haemorrhage on both sides of the windpipe. The coroner's physician reported the cause of death, as shown by the autopsy, to be strangulation. The newspaper reporter, Minnock, claimed to have been in Bellevue at the time, feigning insanity for newspaper purposes; and upon his discharge from the hospital he stated that he had seen the Frenchman strangled to death by the nurses in charge of the Pavilion by the use of a sheet tightly twisted around the insane man's neck. The language used in the newspaper articles written by Minnock to describe the occurrences preceding the Frenchman's death was as follows:--

"At supper time on Wednesday evening, when the Frenchman, Mr. Hilliard, refused to eat his supper, the nurse, Davis, started for him. Hilliard ran around the table, and the other two nurses, Dean and Marshall, headed him off and held him; they forced him down on a bench, Davis called for a sheet, one of the other two, I do not remember which, brought it, and Davis drew it around Hilliard's neck like a rope. Dean was behind the bench on which Hilliard had been pulled back; he gathered up the loose ends of the sheet and pulled the linen tight around Hilliard's neck, then he began to twist the folds in his hand. I was horrified. I have read of the garrote; I have seen pictures of how persons are executed in Spanish countries; I realized that here, before my eyes, a strangle was going to be performed. Davis twisted the ends of the sheet in his hands, round and round; he placed his knee against Hilliard's back and exercised all his force. The dying man's eyes began to bulge from their sockets; it made me sick, but I looked on as if fascinated. Hilliard's hands clutched frantically at the coils around his neck. 'Keep his hands down, can't you?' shouted Davis in a rage.

Dean and Marshall seized the helpless man's hands; slowly, remorselessly, Davis kept on twisting the sheet. Hilliard began to get black in the face; his tongue was hanging out. Marshall got frightened.

'Let up, he is getting black!' he said to Davis. Davis let out a couple of twists of the sheet, but did not seem to like to do it. At last Hilliard got a little breath, just a little. The sheet was still brought tight about the neck. 'Now will you eat?' cried Davis. 'No,' gasped the insane man. Davis was furious. 'Well, I will make you eat; I will choke you until you do eat,' he shouted, and he began to twist the sheet again. Hilliard's head would have fallen upon his breast but for the fact that Davis was holding it up. He began to get black in the face again. A second time they got frightened, and Davis eased up on the string. He untwisted the sheet, but still kept a firm grasp on the folds. It took Hilliard some time to come to. When he did at last, Davis again asked him if he would eat. Hilliard had just breath enough to whisper faintly, 'No.' I thought the man was dying then. Davis twisted up the sheet again, and cried, 'Well, I will make him eat or I will choke him to death.' He twisted and twisted until I thought he would break the man's neck. Hilliard was unconscious at last. Davis jerked the man to the floor and kneeled on him, but still had the strangle hold with his knee giving him additional purchase. He twisted the sheet until his own fingers were sore, then the three nurses dragged the limp body to the bath-room, heaved him into the tub with his clothes on, and turned the cold water on him. He was dead by this time, I believe. He was strangled to death, and the finis.h.i.+ng touches were put on when they had him on the floor. No big, strong, healthy man could have lived under that awful strangling. Hilliard was weak and feeble."

The above article appeared in the morning _Journal_, a few days after the original publication in the _New York World_. The other local papers immediately took up the story, and it is easy to imagine the pitch to which the public excitement and indignation were aroused. The three nurses in charge of the pavilion at the time of Hilliard's death were immediately indicted for manslaughter, and the head nurse, Jesse R.

Davis, was promptly put on trial in the Court of General Sessions, before Mr. Justice Cowing and a "special jury." The trial lasted three weeks, and after deliberating five hours upon their verdict, the jury acquitted the prisoner.

The intense interest taken in the case, not only by the public, but by the medical profession, was increased by the fact that for the first time in the criminal courts of this country two inmates of the insane pavilion, themselves admittedly insane, were called by the prosecution, and sworn and accepted by the court as witnesses against the prisoner.

One of these witnesses was suffering from a form of insanity known as paranoia, and the other from general paresis. With the exception of the two insane witnesses and the medical testimony founded upon the autopsy, there was no direct evidence on which to convict the prisoner but the statement of the newspaper reporter, Minnock. He was the one sane witness called on behalf of the prosecution, who was an eye-witness to the occurrence, and the issues in the case gradually narrowed down to a question of veracity between the newspaper reporter and the accused prisoner, the testimony of each of these witnesses being corroborated or contradicted on one side or the other by various other witnesses.

If Minnock's testimony was credited by the jury, the prisoner's contradiction would naturally have no effect whatever, and the public prejudice, indignation, and excitement ran so high that the jury were only too ready and willing to accept the newspaper account of the transaction. The cross-examination of Minnock, therefore, became of the utmost importance. It was essential that the effect of his testimony should be broken, and counsel having his cross-examination in charge had made the most elaborate preparations for the task. Extracts from the cross-examination are here given as ill.u.s.trations of many of the suggestions which have been discussed in previous chapters.

The district attorney in charge of the prosecution was Franklin Pierce, Esq. In his opening address to the jury he stated that he "did not believe that ever in the history of the state, or indeed of the country, had a jury been called upon to decide such an important case as the one on trial." He continued: "There is no fiction--no 'Hard Cash'--in this case. The facts here surpa.s.s anything that fiction has ever produced.

The witnesses will describe the most terrible treatment that was ever given to an insane man. No writer of fiction could have put them in a book. They would appear so improbable and monstrous that his ma.n.u.script would have been rejected as soon as offered to a publisher."

When the reporter, Minnock, stepped to the witness-stand, the court room was crowded, and yet so intense was the excitement that every word the witness uttered could be distinctly heard by everybody present. He gave his evidence in chief clearly and calmly, and with no apparent motive but to narrate correctly the details of the crime he had seen committed.

Any one unaware of his career would have regarded him as an unusually clever and apparently honest and courageous man with a keen memory and with just the slightest touch of gratification at the important position he was holding in the public eye in consequence of his having unearthed the atrocities perpetrated in our public hospitals.

His direct evidence was practically a repet.i.tion of his newspaper article already referred to, only much more in detail. After questioning him for about an hour, the district attorney sat down with a confident "He is your witness, if you wish to cross-examine him."

No one who has never experienced it can have the slightest appreciation of the nervous excitement attendant on being called upon to cross-examine the chief witness in a case involving the life or liberty of a human being. If Minnock withstood the cross-examination, the nurse Davis, apparently a most worthy and refined young man who had just graduated from the Mills Training School for Nurses, and about to be married to a most estimable young lady, would have to spend at least the next twenty years of his life at hard labor in state prison.

The first fifteen minutes of the cross-examination were devoted to showing that the witness was a thoroughly educated man, twenty-five years of age, a graduate of Saint John's College, Fordham, New York, the Sacred Heart Academy, the Francis Xavier, the De Lasalle Inst.i.tution, and had travelled extensively in Europe and America. The cross-examination then proceeded:--

_Counsel_ (amiably). "Mr. Minnock, I believe you have written the story of your life and published it in the _Bridgeport Sunday Herald_ as recently as last December? I hold the original article in my hand."

_Witness._ "It was not the story of my life."

_Counsel._ "The article is signed by you and purports to be a history of your life."

_Witness._ "It is an imaginary story dealing with hypnotism. Fiction partly, but it dealt with facts."

_Counsel._ "That is, you mean to say you mixed fiction and fact in the history of your life?"

_Witness._ "Yes, sir."

_Counsel._ "In other words, you dressed up facts with fiction to make them more interesting?"

_Witness._ "Precisely."

_Counsel._ "When in this article you wrote that at the age of twelve you ran away with a circus, was that dressed up?"

_Witness._ "Yes, sir."

_Counsel._ "It was not true?"

_Witness._ "No, sir."

_Counsel._ "When you said that you continued with this circus for over a year, and went with it to Belgium, there was a particle of truth in that because you did, as a matter of fact, go to Belgium, but not with the circus as a public clown; is that the idea?"

_Witness._ "Yes, sir."

_Counsel._ "So there was some little truth mixed in at this point with the other matter?"

_Witness._ "Yes, sir."

_Counsel._ "When you wrote that you were introduced in Belgium, at the Hospital General, to Charcot, the celebrated Parisian hypnotist, was there some truth in that?"

_Witness._ "No, sir."

_Counsel._ "You knew that Charcot was one of the originators of hypnotism in France, didn't you?"

_Witness._ "I knew that he was one of the original hypnotists."

_Counsel._ "How did you come to state in the newspaper history of your life that you were introduced to Charcot at the Hospital General at Paris if that was not true?"

_Witness._ "While there I met a Charcot."

_Counsel._ "Oh, I see."

_Witness._ "But not the original Charcot."

_Counsel._ "Which Charcot did you meet?"

_Witness._ "A woman. She was a lady a.s.suming the name of Charcot, claiming to be Madame Charcot."

_Counsel._ "So that when you wrote in this article that you had met Charcot, you intended people to understand that it was the celebrated Professor Charcot, and it was partly true, because there was a woman by the name of Charcot whom you had really met?"

_Witness._ "Precisely."