The Court then adjourned. [Illustration: Mr. Serjeant Shee.] Seventh Day, Wednesday, 21st May, 1856. The Court met at ten o’clock. Speech for the Defence. [Sidenote: Serjeant Shee] Mr. SERJEANT SHEE--May it please your lordships, gentlemen of the jury--I should pity the man who could rise to perform the task which it is now my duty to attempt unoppressed by an overwhelming sense of diffidence and of apprehension. Once only before has it fallen to my lot to defend a fellow-creature upon trial for his life; it is a position, even if the effort should last but for a day, of a nature to disturb the coolest temperament and try the strongest nerves; how much more so when, during six long days, in the eye of my unhappy client, I have been standing between him and the scaffold; conscious that the least error of judgment on my part might consign him to a murderer’s doom, and that through the whole time I have had to breast a storm of public prejudice such as has never before imperilled the calm administration of justice! Gentlemen, it is useless for me to conceal what you know perfectly well, what your utmost endeavours cannot wholly have effaced from your recollection, that for six long months, under the sanction and upon the authority of science, an opinion has universally prevailed that the voice of the blood of John Parsons Cook was crying up unto us from the ground, and that that cry was met by the whole population under an impression and conviction of the prisoner’s guilt in a delirium of horror and indignation by another cry of “blood for blood”! You cannot have failed to have entered upon the discharge of the duties, which you have, as I have observed, most conscientiously endeavoured to perform, without having been to a great extent influenced by that cry; you could not know that it would be your duty to sit in that box to pass between the Crown and the prisoner; you may with perfect propriety, understanding that the facts had been ascertained before a coroner’s jury, and reading such evidence as was there taken, have formed an opinion upon the question of the guilt or innocence of the prisoner; but you cannot but know that whatever that opinion may have been it is your duty to discard it, at least until you have heard the evidence on both sides. [Sidenote: Serjeant Shee]