Justice Stephen’s Retirement
There are also facts in relation to the judge who tried the case which, had they been anticipated at the time of the trial, could not have failed to have had some weight, directly or indirectly, on the minds of the jury; that is to say, his retirement from the Bench not long afterward, in April, 1891, when, to quote his own words in addressing the Bar, of whom he was taking leave, “he had been made acquainted with the fact that he was regarded by some as no longer physically capable of discharging his duties”; and it will be no matter of surprise, to those who have read critically the summing-up of Mr. Justice Stephen on this trial, to notice the entire change from a favorable bias between his address to the jury on the first days of the trial to the violent hostility shown at its conclusion.
This change of front can be in a manner accounted for, as it had been suggested to the prisoner’s friends, by a conversation on the case between Mr. Justice Stephen and another member of the Bench, Mr. Justice Grantham, at a social meeting of an entirely private character.
A mental malady was developed in the judge so soon after the trial that it was properly said to have been caused by his brooding over it, and this condition increased so rapidly and markedly that his resignation was demanded. It is but reasonable to suppose that the judge’s mental incapacity reached farther back than its discovery, and that the illogical and unjust summing-up was connected with the mental overthrow of the otherwise able judge. And it may be here added that Justice Stephen himself, in the second edition of the “General Views of the Criminal Law of England, 1890,” says, at page 173, that out of 979 cases tried before him, from January, 1885, to September, 1889, “the case of Mrs. Maybrick was the only case in which there could be any doubt about the facts.”