Mrs. Maybrick voluntarily told her solicitors, Mr. Arnold and Mr. Richard Cleaver, directly she was arrested and even before the inquest, that she had, at her husband’s urgent request, put a powder into a bottle of Valentine’s meat juice, but that she did not know, until Mrs. Briggs informed her that arsenic had been found in a bottle of meat juice, that the powder she had put in was assumably arsenic. [At the trial both Mr. Richard and Mr. Arnold Cleaver, her solicitors, offered to give evidence to this effect, but Justice Stephen refused to admit it.] She also tried to tell Mrs. Briggs the same thing, but the policeman stopped the conversation; and she also told it to her mother on her arrival. Mrs. Maybrick made no attempt at concealment about having put this powder in, although no one had seen her do it, and her solicitors, instead of relying as a line of defense on showing there was no “mens rea” in what she had done, kept back her account of what she had done. At the trial, however, after all the evidence for the prosecution had been concluded without a single witness speaking of her having put anything into anything, she _insisted_ on telling the jury, as she had told her solicitors, that she did put a powder into a bottle of meat juice, in accordance with an urgent request of her husband’s, but that she did not know it was arsenic. If she did not know, there was no “mens rea.” Upon that evidence, and upon certain suspicious circumstances connected with her conduct in taking the meat juice into the dressing-room and replacing it in the bedroom, the judge, as it is submitted, _misdirected_ the jury in the following passage: “Mr. Michael Maybrick says: ‘Nothing was given to my brother out of that.’ That is to say, nothing was given to him out of the bottle of Valentine’s meat juice, which undoubtedly had arsenic in it. Its presence was detected, but of that bottle which was poisoned he certainly had none. He had a small taste of it _before it was poisoned_, given him by Nurse Gore.” It is submitted that the words “before it was poisoned” is _a gross misdirection_. MISDIRECTION AS TO IDENTITY OF MEAT-JUICE BOTTLE It may be convenient here to interpose the following remarks on the subject of the identity of the bottle. Counsel will observe that the judge referred to the evidence at the inquest and at the magisterial inquiry, which, it is suggested, enables a reference to any discrepancies in the evidence of the witnesses on the three occasions--inquest, magisterial inquiry, and trial. The identity of the half-used bottle, which was found to contain “half a grain of arsenic in solution,” with the bottle which Mrs. Maybrick took into the dressing-room, was not proved. It was assumed alike by the prosecution and the defense, and by Mrs. Maybrick herself, _but it was not proved_. It was proved that there was another half-used bottle, of which James Maybrick had partaken on Monday, 6th of May, when Dr. Humphreys said: