17 JUNE 1871, Page 9

CONFESSIONS AS CRIMINAL EVIDENCE.

MR. JUSTICE BYLES, in summing up last week the case against Claude Scott Woolley,—the lad who, on the 12th March, voluntarily gave himself up for the murder of Samuel Lee, the Brompton potman, commonly known as "Old Jack," on the 13th August last,—reinarked that the only evidence of any import- ance against the prisoner was his own confession ; that excluding that confession, the evidence against him was "scarcely more than mere suspicion," and as far as we can make out, not even so much ; but when the jury returned a verdict of guilty,—accom- panied, according to the odd practice of British juries who are not quite easy in their minds, by a strong recommendation to mercy, which, if the prisoner was guilty, he certainly did not deserve,—the judge remarked that "nobody who had heard the evidence could doubt the propriety of the verdict." In this opinion the learned judge was certainly incorrect. There were probably many, certainly there was one shrewd man who heard the evidence, who had great doubts as to the pro- priety of the verdict,—and, as the judge practically admitted, the whole strength of the case lies in one single question, —the value of voluntary confessions unsupported by cir- cumstantial evidence, as evidence of guilt. Mr. Justice Byles probably knows how very much doubt the most learned members of his own profession have always felt about the worth of voluntary confessions, especially when given, as this was certainly given,—though this point was not produced in evidence,—by a member of a family liable to hypochondriacal affections, suffering from depression due to other causes at the time of his surrender, and who had, ten years ago, suffered from specific brain-disease. An oldLatin jurist (Calphurnius Flaccus, cited in the famous Talbot case seventeen years ago) said that "even a voluntary confession is to be regarded with suspicion " ; and Lord Stowell, an authority quoted in the same case, to whom Mr. Justice Byles is perhaps more likely to defer, laid it down (" Williams v. Williams," Con- sist. 304) that "confession is a species of evidence which, though not inadmissible, is to be regarded with great distrust." Now, as Mr. Justice Byles admitted, the case against Woolley rests to all intents and purposes solely on confession. There are no corrobor- ating circumstances of any value, and there are some extraordinary difficulties. One of two corroborating circumstances relied upon was the fact that, the prisoner having declared when giving himself up that the cause of the murder was a quarrel with "Old Jack" as to the amount of money owed to him by the prisoner for food and beer supplied by the pothouse, his (the prisoner's) name was after- wards found in "Old Jack's" book as owing him money, and that the book was found doubled open by the murdered man, as though he had been murdered in a quarrel about accounts. All this, however, was well known at the time of the murder, and was a circumstance which would have fastened itself upon an intellect in a morbid state. The other circumstance relied on as a corroborating one, was that Woolley had seemed rather flush of money within a fortnight after the murder, i.e., had spent some 15s. at the Crystal Palace on the 25th August in the company of his sweetheart. This, however, was amply accounted for by the prisoner's father, who had himself paid him 10s. in the week of the visit to the Crystal Palace, and who showed that the prisoner was also earn- ing 14s. a week and working over-time, and had drawn money from the Savings' Bank in that very week. These two so-called "corroborating" circumstances, therefore, go for ab- solutely nothing. They would in all probability have happened precisely as they did, even if the prisoner really has made a morbid confession, and is quite innocent of the crime. On the other hand, there are two real difficulties on the hypothesis of his guilt. One is, that professing to tell what he did with the old plasterer's hammer, with which, as it had been universally supposed, the crime was committed, and with which, according to the prisoner's account, he did commit the crime, he says he left it in the fireplace of tin room where the murder was committed,— whereas it has never been found to this day. The other is, that whereas the amount of blood with which the room of the murder was bespattered was excessive, and the murdered man's clothes wers quite saturated with blood, no stain at all was found on the clothes of the slight lad who, according to his own account, committed the crime. Further, he went straight home to his father's house to dinner the same day,—arriving there, two miles from the scene of the murder, within an hour and a half of the time at which the deceased was last seen alive, and nothing was observed at all unusual either about his dress or his manner. It was not till three weeks before Christmas that he told his sweetheart, whom he had treated to the Crystal Palace on the 25th August, that he had something on his mind "too great to tell," language altered by misreport into "too horrible to tell," and it was not till the 12th March, when he had quarrelled with his father and was wandering about without a home, that he put his secret into words, and confessed his crime to the police. Yetwhen "Old Jack's" body was first found, he had been the first to tell his father, and spoke of it "with great feeling." It is remarkable that at the coroner's inquest it was publicly stated that the body was found on its back with "wide staring eyes," and that what the prisoner gave as his reason for giving himself up to the police, was that "poor old Jack used to stand at his bedside at night, staring at him with those big eyes of his, and he could not endure it." This is at least just the way in which a morbid impression would have grown up. As to the external evidence, the plasterer's hammer was not an instrument which the prisoner would, have been specially likely to use, as he was not a plasterer; but it was the talk of the place that this old hammer had been lying there, and might have been used for the • purpose. And, of course, if the impression had grown upon him that he was the murderer, this is the instrument on which his imagination would have fixed. It is certainly moat strange that while apparently anxious in every way to give the minutest evi- dence as to his crime, he should be able to give no clue as to what became of the hammer with which he says he committed it, except that he left it in the fire-place where it used to be, but where it was not found, and that he "cannot account for it." Finally, to complete the external facts of the case, the prisoner, a lad of nine- teen, was greatly the inferion of the murdered man in weight and size, and yet there appears to have been a great struggle as well as a fearful flow of blood. The prosecution did not attempt to show that the marks of footsteps, other than those of the potman, found in the room of the murder, agreed with those of the prisoner's foot.

The counsel for the prosecution admitted that nothing was commoner than false self-accusations, but stated that these were usually given under delirium tremens, from which the prisoner has certainly never suffered. It is, however, notorious that false self-accusations arising from general nervous disease are very far indeed from rare. After the mutiny of the Ilermione frigate, and the brutal murder of its captain, Captain Pigot, during the war of the Great French Revolution, the Government Actuary, Mr. Finlaison, stated that he had himself known at least six sailors who volunteered the confession that they had struck the first blow at Captain Pigot, when it was demonstrable that not one of them had ever been in the ship, or had ever seen Captain Pigot in their lives. Yet "they detailed all the horrid circumstances of the mutiny with extreme minuteness and perfect accuracy." "At the Admiralty," says Mr. Finlaison, "we were always able to detect and to establish their innocence, in defiance of their own solemn asseverations." Now the case of this young fellow, coming, as he does, of a family with a hypochondriac strain in it, is not at all dissimilar to that of those sailors. They could not have been suffering from delirium tremens at the time of their trial, for many of them had surrendered on foreign stations to be put in irons on their own confession, and had been sent to England for trial, so that they could not have been drinking for many weeks before their acquittal. Or take another old case, in which there is no mention whatever of delirium tremens,—quoted from Heineccius in relation to the great Talbot case to which we have before referred ;—" a woman having sud- denly died, suspicion of poison attached upon her husband. Having been placed in confinement, he stated he had bought poison from an apothecary in the neighbouring town, mixed it in a cake, and given it to his wife, who shortly after feeling the effects, attempted without success to relieve herself by means of an emetic of melted butter, and expired in great pain about four o'clock the following morning. He added many corroborating cir- cumstances, and amongst others, that having folded up the remainder of the poison, first in paper, and then in a linen cloth, he had buried it under a sod in a neighbouring field. On a more accurate inquiry this account appeared to be false, for no trace of poison was found in the body, nor could it be ascertained that any poison had been sold ; and, although guided by the self- accuser, nothing could be found deposited as he had described." And this self-accuser accordingly was discharged, though persisting in his confession. Here the only test of delusion was negative, that his own statement of criminal circumstances could not be verified. So far as the plasterer's hammer is concerned, precisely the same may be said of the modern case. For nothing is less likely than that after the murder, a hammer stained by blood should have been stolen by persons innocent of the crime, and taken away from the scene of the murder, where Woolley maintains that he left it. Of course, no one in his senses would run such a risk as that for the sake of an eighteenpenny hammer. Again take the case of the old Campden murder, "the Campden wonder," as it was called, which took place in 1660. A man of the name of Harrison, living at Campden, in Gloucestershire, having gone to a neighbouring village to collect some money, disappeared. His servant, a man of the name of Perry, was sent to look after him. Neither returned that night. Next morning Mr. Harrison's son went himself, and met Perry returning. Circumstances were discovered suggesting foul play, and Perry was taken into custody, at first stoutly main- taining his innocence. "But after some days he desired to unbur- den his conscience to a magistrate, and he then gave a most minute and detailed account of the murder of his master by himself, his mother, and his brother. The readiness with which his delusion adapted itself to circumstances as they arose, and were thrown into his narrative, is marvellous. Thus it happened that the brother, Richard Perry, accidentally drew out of his pocket a cord with a noose, and upon its being shown to John Perry, and his being asked if he knew it, he shook his head, and said, Yea, to his sorrow, for that was the string his brother strangled his master with." And upon this confession, coupled with other circumstances of suspicion, at all events not weaker than those attaching to the Brompton case, the three Perms were exe- cuted. Two years later Mr. Harrison returned to Campden alive and well, giving a romantic and rather unlikely account of the real cause of his absence, for which he may have had his own reasons. The Brompton murderer has certainly not been convicted on any stronger evidence against him than those three people who were put to death for a sick mind's fancy.

For our own parts, we do not think that unsupported confessions should be regarded as at all adequate for proving anybody's guilt. With regard to crimes which morbidly excite the imagination, like murder and adultery, it is far from uncommon for a sick fancy to assume a guilt not really its own, and to fill up the story by borrowing all accessible details from attendant circumstances. If the murderer can give evidence not yet known to any one else of the disposal of any part of the murdered man's goods, or of the instrument by which the murder was committed, of course his story is thereby so far authenticated that these details must have been known to him before the morbid excitement produced by the news of a crime could have had time to work. But this is pre- cisely what cannot be done in Woolley's case. He has given no information which either proves that he had more money after the murder than he could have obtained by fair means, or that he knows what became of the instrument with which the murder was committed. The first sign of feeling he gave was on the discovery of the body,—three days after the actual commis-

!lion of the crime,—when he mentioned it to his father with visible, though quite natural, emotion. and now, though he accuses himself, he cannot account for anything which he would not have known, if he be perfectly innocent. We do not say he is innocent. Bat we do say that the evidence on which he was convicted is of a wholly in- adequate kind, and that it is at least quite as likely he is innocent as that he is guilty. Mr. Justice Byles was certainly far enough from the mark when he asserted that "nobody who had heard the evidence could doubt of the propriety of the verdict."