Not Guilty

"It is a most curious situation, perhaps unique in these courts," mused Mr. Justice Devlin last week, "that the act of murder has to be proved by expert evidence." Even Dr. John Bodkin Adams, the defendant in one of the longest murder trials in Old Bailey's history, was said to have asked in wonderment, "Can you prove it was murder?", when police arrested him last December on suspicion of having poisoned his eccentric old patient, Mrs. Edith Alice Morrell, in seaside Eastbourne six years earlier.

During the three weeks of Adams' trial, as the eyes of the whole newspaper-reading world focused in fascination on the pudgy, amiable defendant, expert after expert took the stand at the behest of the crown's prosecutor, Attorney General Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller. No one denied that on Dr. Adams' orders large doses of heroin, morphine and paraldehyde had been administered to the ailing, 81-year-old widow during the long illness that preceded her death. Only the experts could say whether this medication had hastened her end or merely, as the defense contended, eased the pain of her inevitable passing. The more the experts talked, the less the laymen on the jury could be sure of anything.

Yes? Throughout the long hours of technical testimony, the clouds of doubt were continuously marshaled by the skilled cross-examination of another kind of expert: Defense Attorney Geoffrey Lawrence, Q.C. A puckish, mousy little man with a mind as orderly as a calculating machine. Barrister Lawrence, specialist in real estate and divorce cases, was a relative stranger in criminal court. In his curled white wig and black silk robe, he lacked entirely the stage color of the traditional defense lawyer; yet almost apologetically he managed to leave witness after witness floundering in confusion.

As he took the stand to answer the questions of the prosecutor, Harley Street's distinguished Dr. Arthur Henry Douthwaite, British authority on morphia and heroin, seemed utterly free of doubt. "The only conclusion I can come to," he told the court confidently in connection with the dosage given Mrs. Morrell, "is the intention was to terminate her life." But in crossexamination, Defense Counsel Lawrence had a question: In treating a patient already addicted to drugs, would not a doctor have to face two alternatives, the first of which would be to stop the drugs? "Yes," said Dr. Douthwaite.

"And it is part of your case," said Barrister Lawrence, "that stopping a drug like morphia or heroin will cause illness and suffering?" "Yes," said the doctor.

"And in the case of an old woman verging on 81 it might very well cause collapse?" "Yes," said the doctor.

"With the risk of death?" the defense counsel went on. "Yes."

"Then." concluded Lawrence, "the other course must be to go on and give her more?" "Yes," said Dr. Douthwaite.

In the middle of his third day in the box, Dr. Douthwaite was more than ready to concede that there was "a possible alternative view" to his original contention. Under Lawrence's acid crossexamination, the crown's second expert, Dr. Michael George Corbett Ashby, was likewise forced to admit that the possibility of death by natural causes "cannot be ruled out."

No. With the experts thus thoroughly confounded, the defense was no less merciless with lay testimony, trapping prosecution witnesses (including two nurses) in the bog holes of their own faulty memories. When, at last, the exhausted prosecution rested, Lawrence called only two witnesses to bolster his own case. The frustrated Attorney General was not even given the chance of cross-examining the defendant. Confident that he had the case won, the defense counsel decided not to put his client on the stand.

Heeding the judge's warning that this gesture must not be interpreted as a sign of guilt, the jury of ten men and two women took less than an hour to return its verdict on Defendant John Bodkin Adams--not guilty. With a suggestion of happy tears brimming in his bespectacled eyes, the pudgy doctor drove away from the court to the offices of the Daily Express, presumably to iron out the details of the Beaverbrook paper's purchase (for a reported $14,000) of his life story.

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