THE TRIAL OF STEINIE MORRISON.*
A Barriss jury has not often been plunged into so unfamiliar an atmosphere as pervaded the court at the trial of Steinie Morrison in 1911. A Jew named Leon Beron had been found murdered in the bushes on the loneliest part of Clapham Common. It was said that his face bore marks resembling large S'a cut into the flesh with a sharp knife. These S's may have been signs that Beron had been removed because he was a spy, a man who had acted treacherously towards some secret foreign fraternity in London. The witnesses who crowded the court nearly all belonged to the East End and revealed such exotic ways of life and ways of thinking that the honest British jury must have been bewildered. Perhaps for this reason they were more impressed than was the judge, Mr. Justice Darling, by certain kinds of evidence. The jury very likely thought things " fishy " which were merely odd, and odd only because they were entirely alien to the jury's experience. After all, jurymen in practice. must judge by their own standards, that is to say by their own experience.
We remember hearing a story of how an unscrupulous counsel in a certain case tried to create in the minds of the jury projucliee against the defendants. He drew a. picture of them habitually living in a vicious atmosphere. He_ called attention to the fact that " day after day drinking went on in the drawing. room." He implied that these people, not content with drinking at meals, went on drinking wherever they might be, and had, in fact, drink-sodden brains from which the offences charged against them might naturally be expected to emerge. Yet when the facts had been thrashed out it appeared that this drinking in the drawing-room merely resolved itself into the familiar whisky and soda water which were placed in the drawing-room shortly before the household went to bed—an incident which is usual even in some quite puritanical families ! Counsel had relied upon the majority • Trial of fitelnio Morrison. By H. Pletcher MonIton, B.A. Loacloss William liodse. Yd, ust-1
ei the jurymen, who were simple, unsophisticated persons, applying their own standards and consequently judging the evidence in an atmosphere of immorality that did not really exist.
We arc inclined to think that something of this sort happened In the Steinie Morrison trial. At all events, the verdict of guilty returned against Steinie Morrison on purely circumstantial evidence was opposed, on the whole, to the summing-up of the judge. Mr. Justice Darling may well have thought Morrison guilty, but he showed that he was not quite sure. In pronouncing sentence of death he refrained from using any word which could imply his concurrence with the verdict. Steinie Morrison, however, was not hanged. A considerable public, controversy turned upon his reprieve, but we shall come to that presently. No explanation was ever given why Beron should have gone with Morrison—if he did go with him—to Clapham Common in the middle of the night. Neither man had any connexion with Clapham ; there seemed to be nothing to take them there. Morrison himself was a fine figure of a man, good-looking and El feet 3 inches in height. His record certainly was bad, as he had been in prison more than once. As Mr. H. Fletcher Moulton, the editor of this volume, says, the strange thing was the apparent irresponsibility of all the characters brought into court. For example, one witness described himself as a " retired gentleman living on his means." Upon further inquiries it was discovered that he was living at Rowton House and that his means were about 15e. a week. In cross-examination, counsel suggested that this witness was making jokes at the expense of the court, but the witness was really stating a simple fact which he and his friends did not consider either unusual or amusing. Leon Beron
himself had an income of about 10s. a week, derived from house property. He allowed himself Is. 3d. a day for living expenses, and instead of trying to earn more he used to spend all his time in a Kosher Jewish eating-house which he used as a kind of club. Some of the customers of the eating-house used to stay there daily from breakfast till midnight. In spite of his
actual poverty Leon Beron, like the gentleman of independent means, was in his own estimation a man of substance ; he had a gold watch with a heavy gold chain, upon which hung a five- guinea piece. These possessions, as the editor says, must have represented more than a year's purchase of his annual income. Leon Beron and his two brothers, according to the evidence of their friends, had claims upon a London estate of fabulous value. The claims had been thwarted, it was said, by a firm of rascally solicitors. But though the brothers had come to London to get their rights they had lived for sixteen years in the East End without, so far as could be discovered, taking any sort of action in the matter. The three brothers evidently knew very little about one another's affairs, since their common claim to the fabulous estate had been allowed to lapse and they evidently took little interest in one another's lives. Yet at an appointed time every day these three used to meet for family prayer. So regular was the custom that if one of the brothers did not turn up the failure was so startling to the others that they at once feared that he must have met with a disaster One of the culminating effects of this melodramatic setting was the outburst of one of the brothers of the murdered man, who sung bimeelf in a maniacal frenzy on the counsel for the defence and was removed from the court to an asylum, where he remains to this day.
There was much else that made the trial remarkable—the retractation of evidence given at the police court and assaults committed on men who were called by the prosecution. The editor truly remarks that the whole trial resembled certain Indian cases in which, according to an eminent judge, the court should approach all evidence in the spirit that if verbal it is perjured and if written forged, but, above all, should avoid being prejudiced against the merits of a party's case merely because that-case is supported by false evidence.
As we have said, a public controversy followed the reprieve of Steinie Morrison. It was argued that if he was guilty he Ought to have been hanged and if he was not guilty he ought to have been acquitted—that a reprieve in such a ease as his satisfied neither condition. The editor, however, defends the Rome Secretary's decision. After stating fairly the ground of criticism againet the Home Secretary he says " The fallsey gf this argument lies in the assumption that a prisoner must be acquitted if there is any possible doubt ' of his guilt. Wore this the criterion a conviction could hardly Over result. A man might be found standing over a murdered body with a bloody knife in his hand and the proPOrtY of the victim in his pockets, and yet it would be humanlycrible that another man had committed the murder, and tho person eo found had come to the spot since and merely plundered the body. And yet in such a case a jury would, in the absence of other evidence, convict—and rightly so, because tho prosecu- tion had discharged their burden, they had proved beyond all reasonable doubt ' that the prisoner was the guilty man. That is the true criterion—does the evidence offered provo beyond ' all reasonable doubt ' that the prisoner is guilty In English law the solo tribunal to judge of the reasonableness ' of any doubt suggested by the defence is the jury, and (unless their verdict is held to bo perverse) it is final on this point and binds all higher courts. But the Home Secretary in exorcising his prerogative of mercy is not necessarily bound by the strict rules that bind the courts, though naturally they have groat weight with him. Here apparently ho felt that there was no ground to hold that tho jury were wrong in saying that on the evidence offered there was no reasonable doubt of the prisoner's guilt. Consequently the conviction was allowed to stand. But at the same time he seems to have felt, as many readers undoubtedly will, that, in a case where there were so many circumstances unexplained, there was a ' possible ' doubt, and a chance that evidence might turn up later which would affect the ease. Once a death sentence is executed there can bo no pardon, no reparation. So ho chose to let tho 'prisoner live so that if it were shown that a mistake had occurred, the greatest miscarriage of justice might be avoided."
We can dhly say that Mr. Fletcher Moulton's argument seems to us to be dangerous, because it runs counter to the tradition of English law that it is better to set several criminals free than to punish one innocent man.
While in prison Morrison frequently tried to have his case reopened. The new points which he brought forward told against him rather than in his favour. Mr. Fleteher Moulton himself has not very much doubt that Morrison was guilty. As a prisoner Morrison was violent and intractable. When he was removed to Parkhurst he gave way to despair and determined to starve himself to death. He effected this not by one period of starvation, but by a series of fasts which broke down even his herculean strength. He died in Parkhurst Infirmary on January 24th, 1921.
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