the consideration that the defendant and the public had a unique interest in securing, in the first instance, a verdict based on correct and authoritative rulings and, therefore, in avoiding repeated trials. The trial lasted eleven days with the court sitting from nine in the morning until seven in the evening with a lunch break of one and one-half hours. Joel Parker, a professor at Harvard Law School and former Chief Justice of New Hampshire, 1838 to 1848, noted that "the trial, in the course of its progress, was a cause of extreme excitement, extending through the whole length and breadth of the land, and reaching even into foreign countries." On March 30, after the defense's closing remarks were concluded, after the prosecution's closing remarks lasting nearly five hours and after a brief un-sworn statement by the defendant himself, Chief Justice Shaw delivered a three hours long charge to the jury. Frederick Hathaway Chase in his 1918 biography of Shaw wrote: "Probably no charge ever delivered in this country has been followed as a precedent so frequently and so closely as this memorable effort. With the dignity of expression and the clearness of thought and language ... he expounded the law of homicide in terms which have been followed closely in nearly every murder trial from that day to this." In his charge to the jury, sometimes referred to as "the Webster charge", Shaw reviewed and/or refuted portions of the testimony heard and, in turn, defined murder, manslaughter, circumstantial evidence and reasonable doubt. Chase notes that regarding Shaw's review of the evidence presented that "it must be remembered that at the time when this case was tried there was no statute forbidding the court to charge upon the facts. It was within the power of the court at that time, as it is not now, to express an opinion as to the weight of evidence." Shaw's charge to the jury was something less than unanimously well received in 1850. One pamphleteer at the time, identifying himself only as a "Member of the Legal Profession" wrote: It seems scarcely credible that Judge Shaw could have given utterance to the language published in his "charge to the jury." From the beginning to the end it is but an argument against the prisoner. An argument with all the moral force of a dictation to the jury, a dictation which makes a pretended trial