A petition to Mr Peel: Gideon Mantell and the trial of Hannah Russell

Abstract

In the summer of 1826, Hannah Russell was tried for petty treason, viz. the murder of her husband, Benjamin Russell, by poisoning. Their lodger, Daniel Leney, was indicted as her accomplice. The exact circumstances surrounding the death were unclear but Hannah was known to have purchased white arsenic (arsenious oxide). A local surgeon, Thomas Evans, supported at the post-mortem examination by two further surgeons, not only reported severe corrosion of the gastrointestinal tract, but also the recovery of nearly an eighth of an ounce of arsenic from the victim's stomach. Both accused were convicted and sentenced to death. Leney was executed, but Hannah Russell was respited because the trial judge, Sir Robert Graham, had doubts as to a direction he had given to the jury. The surgeon and paleontologist Gideon Mantell took up her case, stressing that death from arsenic could not have taken place as quickly as was alleged and maintaining that the chemical evidence of arsenic poisoning was inconclusive. He gained the support of some eminent chemists and physicians.

Subsequently, forensic toxicologists [Sir] Robert Christison and Alfred Swaine Taylor pointed out that Mantell's arguments as to the possible time to death in arsenic poisoning were quite wrong. Moreover, Evans gave details of the analyses he and his colleagues had undertaken to Christison, who pronounced the findings sound, as indeed did Mantell after Evans and his colleagues published details of their investigations in the Sussex Advertiser. Papers in The National Archives show that Hannah was pardoned for the offence for which she was indicted, leaving it open to prefer a lesser charge. That this was never done may have been due to Mantell's campaign, at least in part, but the pardon she did receive was due to the concern of the trial judge as to the implications of the evidence presented at trial.