Prefiguring the Arsenic Wars: Dr. Samuel Jackson's Exposé of a False Accusation of Poisoning in Northumberland, Pennsylvania

A Striking Parallel

In January 2007 a jury in San Diego convicted Cynthia Sommer of murdering her husband, a marine sergeant, with arsenic. It was reported that she contacted an Internet dating service before her husband’s death, and that soon afterward she threw wild parties, had breast augmentation surgery, and began a new romantic relationship. These potentially irrelevant circumstances might have interfered with scientific investigation. On the basis of laboratory tests and expert opinions that seemed to prove that her husband died of arsenic poisoning, Sommer spent over two years in the Las Colinas jail. But when the verdict was challenged, sufficient questions were raised concerning the laboratory procedures and results to lead the prosecutor to send newly discovered tissue samples (preserved in paraffin) to the Quebec Toxicology Center. No arsenic was found in any of the samples, and tests determined that the earlier reported tissue distributions of arsenic were “physiologically improbable.” The murder charge was dropped.

The defense’s criticism of the prosecution’s experts and evidence repeated a pattern begun in the 19th century when arsenic-detection technologies were rapidly evolving: a toxicological expert was overly confident, the defendant was convicted, a more rigorous expert reanalyzed the evidence, and the defendant was acquitted. In the Sommer case it became clear that the initial specimens had been improperly transported and managed and that the government laboratory where they were tested lacked standard operating procedures and was not accredited by the American Board of Forensic Toxicology. The inexperienced analyst lacked the necessary knowledge to test for arsenic, and he rejected the possibility of sample contamination on the basis of an unscientific belief that a contaminating source can be monitored. In addition the lab did not follow a peer-reviewed arsenic speciation method and lacked appropriate chain-of-custody documentation for the specimens. Finally, the finding of 100% dimethylarsenic acid (DMA) was not consistent with other case studies involving death by inorganic arsenic, and Sommer’s husband did not display the appropriate symptoms before his death. As in the Logan case, the only explanation for such carelessness is in the unjustified overconfidence of the prosecution’s experts. In Jackson’s words, arsenic detection in the service of criminal law is a “life and death . . . business which the most experienced ought to approach with fear and trembling, with terror and dismay.”

Since the early 19th century, arsenic-poisoning trials have provided fodder for speculation on the moral character and salacious misdeeds of the accused—and of the scientists who accuse them. In the United States, France, Britain, and elsewhere accusations of hubris and moral carelessness have been as important in the advancement of science as in the advancement of justice. And, as the Sommer case makes clear, the arsenic wars have not ended. The dynamic changes in arsenic-detection techniques in the first half of the 19th century are similar to rapid developments in forensic science in the last several decades. The modesty and moral circumspection of some of the experts in chemistry just before and during the arsenic wars provide a model for the appropriate attitude toward forensic science in contemporary courts.

For Further Reading

Bertomeu-Sánchez, José Ramon, and Augustí Nieto-Galan, eds. Chemistry, Medicine, and Crime: Mateu J. B. Orfila (1787–1853) and His Times. Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications/USA, 2006.

Burney, Ian A. “A Poisoning of No Substance: The Trials of Medico-Legal Proof in Mid-Victorian England.” Journal of British Studies 30 (1999), 59–92.

Goldsmith, Robert H. . “The Search for Arsenic.” In More Chemistry and Crime: From Marsh Arsenic Test to DNA Profile, edited by S. Gerber and R. Saferstein, 149–168. Washington, DC: American Chemical Society, 1997.

Jackson, Samuel . “Case of Supposed Poisoning with Arsenic.” American Journal of Medical Science 5 (1829), 237–246.

Mohr, James C. Doctors and the Law: Medical Jurisprudence in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Spokes, Sidney. “A Case of Circumstantial Evidence.” Sussex County Magazine (1937), 118–122.

Watson, Katherine. Poisoned Lives: English Poisoners and Their Victims. London: Hambledon & London, 2004.

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