Samuel Wright, a bricklayer, was on Saturday last living with
a woman named Maria Green, in the Waterloo Road. They quarrelled, apparently out of jealousy, and on Sunday morning Wright cut his paramour's throat. On the arrival of the police the murderer gave himself up, an Tuesday he was committed for trial, and, on the following day, persisting in the plea of guilty, he was sentenced to death. It is a strange but a just sarcasm on English justice that the whole press should have remarked on the rapidity with which the trial followed the crime. The delay which inter- venes between accusation and verdict is a disgrace to English pro- cedure, more especially as it is maintained from motives of economy only. No prisoner ought to be detained for more than a month without a trial at farthest, yet Townley, the murderer now under sentence, was kept months untried. suppose he had been inno- cent. We cry out at the German system under which a man may be imprisoned for years and after all acquitted, and forget that precisely the same kind of injustice is involved in a delay of months.
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