Lein to Hit (Fiala.
APPEAL IN CRIMINAL CASES.
14th September 1859. Sin—I observe in the Spectator of last week, some remarks suggested by the "Smethurst reprieve." Upon the circumstances of that case I have nothing to say. You observe, however, " the upshot of the business to be anomalous and unsatisfactory, pointing to a state of the law by no means creditable to the British nation, in the absence of any Court of Criminal Appeal." Circumstances which came within my observation, more than three years' ago, impressed me with a like opinion, and as they exhibit an instance in which injustice was juridically perpetrated to a considerable ex- tent, and would have been carried much further had it not been for extra- juridical interference, I am acting under a sense of duty in the endeavour to bring them under public notice, in support of your argument. On October 10, 1855, a farmer, residing about eight miles from a large
market-town, was returning from a fair at that place. In a lonely part of the road he was attacked by two ment a little before nine o'clock in a very dark night, pulled from a mule on which he rode, and robbed, not without a struggle, of his watch and the money he had in his pocket. He lost no time in giving information to the Police : declaring one of the men to have been G. P. a labourer residing in a neighbouring village whom he knew. This man was immediately apprehended at his own house : taken before the magistrates, and committed for trial. Shortly after, the watch was offered in pledge at a pawnbroker's at the market-town. This led to the apprehen- sion of the man who offered it, J. B. and of another,. W. D., to whose possession it was traced. G. P. and these two were tried at the Spring Assizes, 1856, before the Lord Chief Justice. The case was soon disposed of, severer witnesses prepared to give evidence of alibi in favour of G. P. not being heard. The Judge, in summing up, commented on his positive identification by the person robbed, and made strong remarks on the state- ment made in his defence, that he was elsewhere at the time the robbery was committed, considering it as a perjured defence disproved by the evi- dence. The prisoners were all found guilty, G. P. and W. D. sentenced to fifteen years' transportation, and J. B., as accessory after the fact, to a shorter term.
A strong impression, however, prevailed among G. P.'s neighbours, who
are my neighbours also, of his innocence. Inquiries were therefore. made with a view to application in his behalf, should circumstances appear to make it necessary. Abundant and conclusive evidence appeared that he was at the market-town seven miles from the scene of the robbery at the time when it was committed. Having been asked the morning after the robbery, by the policeman who apprehended him, where he had been, and what ho had been doing at nine o'clock the day before, he had said he was at the Robin Hood, at Leicester, frying beef-steaks about that time. On inquiry before the trial it was found no person had been so engaged in that house at nine o'clock of the evening of the day in question. This, it is to be presumed, was the disproval referred to by the Judge. But G. P., having been employed to drive some sheep to the fair early, had been occupied as he described himself to have been about nine o'clock in the morning; to which period of the day he thought, in his confusion when first taken up, the question referred. Finally, the person robbed himself certified to the anxiety and uneasiness he felt, on perusal of the statements and declarations laid before him, on account of the evidence he had given, admitting that he was shaken in his belief as to the identity, and could not resist the impression now upon his mind that he bad mistaken W. D. for G. P., the two being alike in height and figure. J. B. and W. D. were old companions, both ticket-of-leave men, strangers to G. P., and W. D. made a tardy confession that it was J. B. who was with him and not G. P. in the robbery. -The case thus revised was submitted to the Home Office, and on April 15, 1856,- a printed form was received by the applicants filled up with the intelligence that the remainder of the prisoner's sentence &as remitted.
There then is the signal instance of a false verdict (the arMinitly in the fact compels the contradiction in terms) of a jury, given under the super- intendence and direction of—no unpaid Chairman of Quarter Sessions,—of no Puisne Judge,—but of a Chief Justice of England now in the ripeness of his legal experience and discrimination her Lord Chancellor. Such result may perhaps in some degree be ascribed to the nature of the defence in the case in question. I have heard it pronounced as a sort of axiom among lawyers, that an alibi, from the ease with which it may be perjuriously maintained, is a species of defence seldom worth attention ; but if the mind of one in the position of the Judge in the case in question is not guarded against fallacy lurking in a general proposition, there can be no stronger proof than this, of the necessity of that which you recommend—viz., an appeal in criminal cases. Having thus had occasion to refer to the above case, I trust I may be ex- cused in the mention of another point it involves in connexion with the great object of a secure administration of justice. I mean the disposition very generally prevailing among those in a judicial position to invite, and implicitly accept, testimony against prisoners from Police-constables. It is very generally the practice on the apprehension of an accused person for these functionaries to ask him questions, and put down the answers, to be used and referred to on the trial; and I have heard the smartness and per- spicuity of their evidence complacently dilated on from the bench as giving facilities for conviction. Is this altogether fair ? Is the practice consistent with that which I had always conceived to be a distinguishing feature in the administration of criminal justice in England—that a prisoner should never be exposed without caution to crimination of himself? or is it just to give effect always to the evidence of trained and practised witnesses brought to bear against the awkwardness and difficulty of expression of rustics finding themselves perhaps for the first time in their lives in a court of justice ?
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