My lord, in one week--in some short days from this--William Palmer, my brother, will stand before his God; he will have to answer for his life, and for the sins of his life; he will have to endure that fearful scrutiny into his past from which even the best of us may well shrink with terror. But there is one crime for which he will not have to answer, and that is the crime for which your lordship has convicted him. My brother, William Palmer, is no murderer. His whole life, his whole character, his whole bearing at and since the trial are quite convincing of the fact. From childhood upward no man was gentler of heart; his charity was inexhaustible; his kindliness to all who were in distress was well known. To him the wanderer resorted in his afflictions; by him the poor and houseless were fed and comforted. I write in the face of the public, with my character as a gentleman and a clergyman at stake, and I avow only facts that cannot be denied. His liberality was a proverb, his frank sincerity, his courage, his faithful loyalty to his friends, his temperance, his performance of the duties of religion, his social relations in the character of father, husband, and son won for him the love and confidence of all who approached him; and though it is true that in one fatal instance he violated the laws of his country, and subjected himself to a severe penalty for an infringement of its commercial code, yet this excepted, his was in all respects the very opposite of that cool, calculating, cowardly, crafty temper which is essential to the poisoner, and which we know cannot co-exist with these qualities which my brother possessed from his earliest years down even to the day when your lordship sent him to his death. My lord, beware, lest while you convict of murder you are not yourself a party to a murder! It is not the first time that the annals of our own jurisprudence have exhibited traces of blood; it is not the first time that judges have persuaded juries to convict to death on circumstantial evidence. The records of every country abound in remarkable cases of persons judicially destroyed for crimes of which they were entirely innocent. A mistaken resemblance to the actual perpetrator, the fact of having been seen near the spot where the crime was committed, an apparent motive of self-interest, a confusion of manner when he was accused, or some other suspicious circumstance has contributed to bring the odium of guilt and consequent punishment on the wrong party. At one time cases of frightful injustice were committed by condemning individuals for murder when it was not proved that a murder had been perpetrated. The now well-recognised principle in criminal law--violated, indeed, by your lordship in my brother’s case--that no murder can be held as having been committed till the body of the deceased has been discovered, had, apparently, terminated this form of legal oppression until your lordship persuaded a jury to find a man