"Ach, dose young men!" he exclaimed, wringing his hands--"Dose
young men, dey come here and dey opened der vindow and let out
der gas and all mine evidence esgaped."
It is said that this interesting personage once instructed his
jury to find that "the diseased came to his death from an
ulster on the stomach."
These anecdotes are, perhaps, what judges would call obiter
dicta, yet the coroner's court has more than once been
utilized as a field in the actual preparation of a criminal
case. When Roland B. Molineux was first suspected of having
caused the death of Mrs. Adams by sending the famous poisoned
package of patent medicine to Harry Cornish through the mails,
the assistant district attorney summoned him as a witness to
the coroner's court and attempted to get from him in this way
a statement which Molineux would otherwise have refused to
make.
When all the first hullabaloo is over and the accused is under
arrest and safely locked up, it is usually found that the
police have merely run down the obvious witnesses and made a
prima facie case.
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