Remarks on the trial of Robert Reid, for the murder of his wife : before the High Court of Justiciary, at Edinburgh, on the 29th of June 1835 / by John Fletcher.

Fletcher, John, 1792-1836.

Date:: 1835

Credit: Remarks on the trial of Robert Reid, for the murder of his wife : before the High Court of Justiciary, at Edinburgh, on the 29th of June 1835 / by John Fletcher. Source: Wellcome Collection.

42/78 (page 32)

$is this fact not as easily reconcileable with the pre- sumption that the accident took place after death, as that it was the cause of the fatal event; nay, is it not even more easily reconcileable, supposing the evi- dence of the Ecchymosis to be disallowed, with the former presumption than with the latter? When the corpse was first found, at half-past two o'clock on Sa- turday, the position of the head was, if not quite erect, as stated by the witness Ness, at any rate only a little inclined backwards and to one side, as deposed by Chisiiolm and Manners, justlike a usualcorpse as remarked by Ness, who had been accustomed to stretch dead bodies, and not the least like as if the neck was brokenand it further appears, from the evidence of Young and Chisholm, that the head did not change its position when the body was shaken by the hand of the latter applied to the shoulder, with so much force as to change the position of the hand which was upon the floor, so as to turn the palm upwards. Is this consistent with the presumption of a fractured and dislocated neck ; nay, does not Dr Forbes himself admit that the head would have dangled, when the shoulders were shaken, if fracture and dis- location had previously existed ? It is true the rigi- dity of death might have prevented this, and, had the alleged injury been received when the body was recumbent, so that the head was prevented from as- suming the dangling position natural after such an occurrence, might have held the head in the posture described even under this discipline. But, not to recur to all that has been already said against the probability of such rigidity having taken place at this tunc, the body was, in fact, not rigid—the neck,$