About three weeks after the Coroner's inquest there was a suggestion that there should be a magistrates hearing into the Cook's murder. However when Palmer's solicitor, John Smith, heard this he wrote immediately to the Home Secretary to remind him that Lord Campbell had strongly expressed a wish that there be no further discussion in newspapers or elsewhere for fear that the prisoners case might be prejudiced. Had there been a magisterial investigation Palmer would have had the right to give evidence and speak in his own defence. However Palmer was tried without ever having the opportunity at any stage to give his own account of events.

Palmer's lawyers could not sum up their case for the defence:
The Defence was not permitted to make a closing speech summing up the case on behalf of the prisoner. The introduction of the Denham Act 1865, just nine years after Palmer's trial, gave a Defence lawyer the right to sum up their case.

In 1856 there was no Court of Criminal Appeal:
After a verdict the only way of making an appeal in 1856 was by appealing directly to the Home Secretary.

A couple of petitions were made to the Home Secretary, on Palmer's behalf, on the grounds that strychnine was not found in the body of the deceased John Parsons Cook. Another issue raised was that the timing of the execution, 14th June 1856, was the day on which, together with France, Britain was celebrating the ending of the Crimean War and also the day on which the Prince Imperial was to be baptised. They suggested that the execution of a man about whose guilt there was some doubt would surely spoil such a festive day. All the appeals failed to make the Home Secretary reduce the sentence.

Nowadays there is a Court of Criminal Appeal. The setting up of a Court of Appeal was considered at the end of the Nineteenth Century. The 'final nudge' came as a result of another Staffordshire case. On May 17th 1907 the Home Secretary advised His majesty to grant George Edalji a free pardon, without compensation. Edalji was the son of a the Vicar of Great Wyrley in Staffordshire and had been sentenced to seven years penal servitude in 1903 following a series of incidents in which horses were badly maimed. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author famous for his Sherlock Holmes books, was one of the men who campaigned on Edalji's behalf. Following Edalji's release in 1907 a Commission of Enquiry was set up to look criminal appeals. Edalji returned to his job as a solicitor but never had the satisfaction of receiving an official apology for his wrongful conviction.

Under the Contempt of court Act of 1981 so-called 'background' material, which has not been heard by a jury, cannot be published until a trial is finished.

In 1856 the newspapers of the day, for months before the trial, published material, almost every day, that would be likely to prejudice a jury. The case was subject to an Act of Parliament which caused the case to be switched to London and produced even more publicity. Reporters interviewed most of the main witnesses and published damming statements and published accounts of the so called 'Rugeley Tragedies', suspicious deaths that all cast doubt upon Palmer's innocence.

The Times Report of the Trial of William Palmer published in 1856 shows that even the Attorney-General who was prosecuting Palmer commented, in his opening speech, upon the fact that the details of the case had been widely reported and discussed.

He was surely asking an impossible task of the jury all of whom must have been
aware of much of the sensational publicity surrounding the case.