Crown Prosecutor. Mr. Haggitt extended
to the prisoner a degree of consideration and forbearance, justified
undoubtedly towards an undefended prisoner. But, as we have seen, Butler
was not in reality undefended. At every moment of the trial he was in
communication with his legal advisers, and being instructed by them how
to meet the evidence given against him. Under these circumstances the
unfailing consideration shown him by the Crown Prosecutor seems almost
excessive. From the first moment of the trial Butler was fully alive
to the necessities of his situation. He refrained from including in his
challenges of the jury the gentleman who was afterwards foreman; he knew
he was all right, he said, because he parted his hair in the middle, a
"softy," in fact. He did not know in all probability that one gentleman
on the jury had a rooted conviction that the murder of the Dewars was
the work of a criminal lunatic. There was certainly nothing in Butler's
demeanour or behaviour to suggest homicidal mania.

The case against Butler rested on purely circumstantial evidence.

No new facts of importance were adduced at the trial. The stealing
of Dewar's wages, which had been paid to him on the Saturday, was the
motive for the murder suggested by the Crown. The chief facts pointing
to Butler's guilt were: his conversation with Mallard and Bain previous
to the crime; his demeanour after it; his departure from Dunedin; the
removal of his moustache and the soles of his boots; his change of
clothes and the bloodstains found upon them, added to which was
his apparent inability to account for his movements on the night in
question.

Such as the evidence was, Butler did little to shake it in
cross-examination. His questions were many of them skilful and pointed,
but on more than one occasion the judge intervened to save him from the
danger common to all amateur cross-examiners, of not knowing when to
stop. He was most successful in dealing with the medical witnesses.
Butler had explained the bloodstains on his clothes as smears that had
come from scratches on his hands, caused by contact with bushes. This
explanation the medical gentlemen with good reason rejected. But they
went further, and said that these stains might well have been caused by
the spurting and spraying of blood on to the murderer as he struck his
victims. Butler was able to show by the position of the bloodstains on
the clothes that such an explanation was open to consi