GOSSIP ON THE JUDGMENT SEAT. T HE verdict in the Penge
murder case has called forth an extraordinary amount of criticism. The circumstances that four persons have been condemned to death, that all of them are young, and that two of them are women, are in themselves sufficient to account for this. There is the further reason, however, that the accusation is one which necessarily leaves room for alternative explanations. When a man is shot or stabbed, there is no doubt that a murder has been committed ; the only point to be discovered is who it is that has committed it. But in the case of death by starvation, it is seldom pos- sible to arrive at more than a moral certainty, even on the former point. Death from starvation may be the result of disease, or of madness, or of forcible withholding of food ; or it may be due to disease itself caused by the forcible withholding of food. Many of the letters that appear in the newspapers seem to assume that BO long as it is physi- cally possible that a death could have been brought about by one or other of the first two causes, it is improper to set it down to the third or fourth. This would be a highly convenient doctrine for persons desiring to commit murder, They would have nothing to do but to shut their victim up, starve him at their leisure, and then show that the symptoms are not such as absolutely to exclude the theory that he was unable or unwilling to take food. In the opinion of a part of the public, no amount of proof that he was unable to get food, however much he might have wished for it, ought to have any weight with the jury. It is enough that somebody else died under circumstances more or less similar, and is known not to have been murdered. The practical contempt in which the British public hold the verdict of a jury is quite equal to their theoretical reverence for it. They would be shocked at the notion of its being set aside by the Crown, or by Parliament, or by the Judge who tried the case ; but they are quite ready that it should be set aside, in deference to a certain number of amateur speeches for the defence in the form of newspaper letters, If Mr. Cross should advise the Queen to reprieve all four of the criminals now under sentence of death, the news would be welcomed with a burst of self-congratulation from this self-constituted and anonymous court of appeal. If he fails to find any ground for the exercise of the prerogative of mercy, he will probably be told that he has set the country at defiance, and been an accomplice in a judicial murder. It seems a pity, if this sort of thing is to go on, that it should not be reduced to some kind of method. How many letters from doctors who are better informed about Harriet Staunton's symptoms than their fellow-practitioners who examined the body, or from self-appointed jurymen who are more familiar with the evidence than the actual jury who saw the demeanour of the witnesses,, and heard every word of their testimony, ought to be considered sufficient to justify a reprieve ? In a matter of this kind, heads must be counted, not weighed, because with rare exceptions the only heads which have had the opportunities of knowledge which make them worth weighing are those who are responsible for the verdict. It is plain, therefore, that some other machinery ought to be provided than publication in a newspaper. The most amiable of editors will hardly go on inserting letters which say nothing that has not been said already. But as the only excuse for setting aside the verdict of a jury is that a certain number of people do not agree with it, it is of the first importance to know how large a body the malcontents are. Perhaps the true value of the kind of agitation which has been going on ever since the verdict in the Penge case, would be better appreciated if it were worked on the principle of Hospital Saturday. A stall, with a black flag and a woman sitting behind it, might be set up at every street-corner, and it might be enacted that as soon as the letters laid on these stalls reached a certain number, the criminals should be reprieved. We do not see that this system would be a bit more absurd, as regards the agitators, than the one which prevails now. There is not the least reason to suppose that these letters in the newspapers put the Secretary of State in possession of any single fact that he did not know before. He has before him all the evidence given at the trial ; he has the benefit of the Judge's observations on it ; he has the power of consulting any other Judge, if he feels any doubt as to the correctness of the view taken by the Judge who tried the case ; he can appeal to the heads of the medical profession, if he is dissatisfied with any part of the medical testimony. It is absurd to suppose that even these self-estimating amateurs believe that they can inform the Secretary of State. The utmost stretch of their imagination cannot go further than the hope of influencing him by the natural dislike which a Minister has of doing some- thing which will be exceedingly distasteful to a large number of his countrymen. The larger this number is, the more likely he will be to feel this dislike, so that these letters will clearly be of more avail if they reach him in the mass than if he reads a selection of them, whether representative or random, in the newspapers. The Secretary of State would be so far benefited by the change, that he would no longer have to choose between duty and popularity. As re- gards the prerogative of mercy, he would become a mere returning officer, whose only business is to reckon the votes correctly. This would be a far preferable position to that which the agitators against the verdict in the Peng° case appear to assign to him. Their theory of Mr. Cross's duty towards the Stauntons is that he should read these letters, be convinced by them if he can, and act on them whether he is convinced or not. The function of a Registrar is, at all events, more dignified than this. The argument for creating a Court of Criminal Appeal derives some force from the temper of a section of the public in this and some other cases. It is not as yet considered decent to seek to influence the action of a Judge by unasked comments upon the evidence, and if the persons charged with the duty of determining whether a capital sentence should be carried out were Judges, it is possible that this decent reticence would not be BO unblushingly abandoned as it is now. But whatever reasons there exist against seeking to influence the action of a Judge, are equally powerful against seeking to influence the action of the Secretary of State. The prerogative of mercy is not one that should be exercised either from caprice or policy. There should in all cases be some solid reason for distrusting the evidence given at the trial, or for holding that the verdict wets against the weight of evidence, or for reconciling national feeling with the course of true justice. To determine whether such reasons exist, and to measure the degree of importance that ought to be attached to them, is as strictly though not as formally a judicial function as the func- tion of the Judge who originally tried the case. We call the verdict of the jury in the Pengo case final, but in fact it is almost as much provisional as though a now trial were expressly provided for, Unfortunately the action of the Secretary of State is not fenced about with any of the reserves with which a salutary custom has protected the proceedings in Court. If a letter such as any one of those which may now be read every morning had been addressed to Mr. Justice Hawkins or to any member of the jury, the writer would have been severely rebuked. Mr. Cross now unites in his own person the duties both of Mr. Justice Hawkins and of the jury, but no one feels any scruple about thrusting suggestions upon him. It is a singular state of mind which can fancy that a mere reading of a more or less abridged report of the evidence and of the Judge's summing-up qualifies any man to pronounce the verdict in the Penge case wrong and the summing-up of the Judge unfair. But it is evidently a state of mind which is common to a considerable number of Englishmen at the present moment. The only possible reason why their opinion should be deferred to is that it is their opinion. As compared with the Minister to whom their letters are in fact, though
not in form, addressed, they are necessarily ignorant of what they are writing about, and the most pertinent part of each usually amounts to this, that somebody else was not murdered, and therefore that Harriet Staunton may not have been. We do not deny the force of this argument, supposing a sufficiently exact parallel between the two cases can be made out. But the utmost that the writers of such letters can hope to do is to state the facts of the case with which they aro familiar but the Secretary of State is not ; but what they usually attempt to do is to restate the facts of the case with which the Secretary of State is familiar, while they are not. We shall not insult Mr. Cross by supposing that he can be in the slightest degree in- fluenced by this sort of agitation, but it speaks ill for the good- sense of the English public that it should be necessary for him to close his ears against it.
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