Mr Justice Callan's Summing Up

Although it was not in Justice Callan's power to direct the jury to acquit Mareo, it is clear that he believed that most of the links in the Crown's long chain of reasoning were extremely weak. He pointed out that the supposed proposition of Sir William Willcox's about veronal - on which the Prosecution's case almost entirely depended - was not 'universally accepted'.²⁵ However, even if it had been accepted as medical fact - and the judge pointed out that the Crown required nothing less than that - then it did 'not fit this case as described by the Crown witnesses', since the proposition applied only to patients initially in a coma. Although Dr Giesen was wrong to maintain that there 'were no gastric juices in a fasting stomach', since no one page 62had thought to ask any of the doctors whether the rate of absorption might be considerably slower, Dr Giesen's theory was very far from disproved.²⁶ He questioned whether Dr Gilmour - who maintained that he had changed his mind after hearing Stark's final cross-examination at the first trial - 'could… be relied upon' when he 'shrank from saying the fatal quantity could have been in one portion of the cup and yet… [was] satisfied that it could have been in this other not much larger quantity of milk?'²⁷ As for the non-medical aspects of the case, Justice Callan said that Whitington's 'actions [in volunteering to testify]… speak honesty'.²⁸ He pointed out that a man who kills himself as well as his wife would not also 'enjoy the society of Eleanor Brownlee'.²⁹ And he thought that if Mareo had been lying about Morgan's drugs then this 'would bespeak a very considerable degree of foresight',³⁰ but that if Mareo's guilt about Morgan's drugs had been real rather than feigned then this might explain 'a tremendous number of facts which look very black against him particularly his obvious reluctance and failure to send for a doctor'.³¹ Finally, he raised very cautiously the possibility of a manslaughter verdict, asking the jury to consider carefully whether 'there [was] anything to suggest that his mind was not working sufficiently well for him to know what he was doing'.³²