During the early years of my imprisonment I received my children’s photographs once a year; also several friendly letters from Mr. Thomas Maybrick, with information about them. But as time passed on, these ceased altogether. When I could endure the silence no longer I instructed Mr. R. S. Cleaver, of Liverpool--who had been the solicitor in my case, and to whose unwavering faith and kindness I owe a debt I can never hope to repay--to write to Mr. Michael Maybrick to forward fresh photographs of my boy and girl. To this request Mr. Thomas Maybrick replied that Mr. Michael Maybrick refused to permit it. When the matter was further urged Mr. Michael Maybrick himself wrote to the governor to inform me that my son, who had been made acquainted with the history of the case, did not wish either his own or his sister’s photograph to be sent to me. PART TWO ANALYSIS OF THE MAYBRICK CASE Introduction PETITIONS FOR A REPRIEVE The jury’s verdict of guilty was rendered on August 7, 1889. The evidence at the trial, as well as the learned judge’s “summing up,” was reported almost verbatim in the English press. The result was that, not only in Liverpool, but in almost every city, town, and village of the United Kingdom, men and women of every class and grade of society arrived at the conclusion that the verdict was erroneous--as not founded upon evidence, but upon the biased and misleading summing up of the case by the mentally incompetent judge. Within a few days my lawyers, the Messrs. Cleaver, of Liverpool, who had notified the press that they would supply forms of petition, were inundated with applications. For the first two days they issued one thousand a day, and I have been informed that no less than five thousand petitions for a reprieve, representing nearly half a million signatures, were sent to the Home Secretary within the following ten days. In response to these, the Home Office issued to the press the following decision: “After the fullest consideration, and after taking the best medical and legal advice that could be obtained, the Home Secretary advised Her Majesty to respite the capital punishment of Florence Elizabeth Maybrick and to commute the punishment to penal servitude for life; inasmuch as, although the evidence leads to the conclusion that the prisoner administered and attempted to administer arsenic to her husband with intent to murder him, yet it does not wholly exclude a reasonable doubt _whether his death was in fact caused by the administration of arsenic_.” ILLOGICAL POSITION OF HOME SECRETARY