Burke
and Hare
.................................................................
In
Edinburgh’s sensational body-snatching trial of 1828, William
Burke was tried and sentenced to death, while his equally
notorious accomplice William hare got off scot-free for turning
King’s Evidence. The pair of them had murdered to provide bodies
for an anatomist to dissect, Burke was hanged before a vast crowd
in January 1829 and his corpse was hanged over to the College of
Surgeons ironically, for purposes of dissection.
A
Perfectly Ordinary Little Case
.................................................................
Mr.
Mervyn Griffith-Jones, prosecutor at the lady Chatterley trial,
has been immortalized for asking jury members whether they would
‘wish your wife or servants to read it?’ But he is almost as
well remembered for another splendid utterance in a different
trial. ‘It is a perfectly ordinary little case of a man charged
with indecency with four or five guardsmen,’ he said.
Not
naughty Enough
.................................................................
Times
have changed since lady Chatterley trial. In May 1984, a
26-year-old Sussex plumber filed a complaint against a local
sex-shop, claiming that five pornographic videos he had hired to
view with his ex-wife were not explicit enough. The court at
Worthing found in his favour, awarding a £
15
refund. After the hearing the plumber said, ‘I think I have
proved the point that these shops cannot get away with taking
customers for a ride simply because they are too embarrassed to
complain.’
A
Georgian Gender Bender
.................................................................
The
Countless of Bristol may have enjoyed supreme scandal in her day.
But if quantity rather than quality of bigamy is to be the
standard then the West Country’s Mary Hamilton far outshone her.
On
7 October 1746, this remarkable woman was tried at Taunton in
Somerset for wrongfully marrying no fewer than 14 times – in
each case marrying other women.
The
14th wife appeared to give evidence against her,
describing how they had undergone a lawful marriage and bedded and
lived together for more than three months before she suspected
that her partner was another woman. The ‘vilest and the most
deceitful practices’ had, it seemed, been employed to mislead
her.
The
judges appeared to have uncertain about the legal sex of Mary
Hamilton (alias Charles Hamilton, alias George Hamilton, alias
William Hamilton), but they ruled that ‘he, she, the prisoner at
the bar,’ was an uncommon notorious cheat and was to be gaoled
for six months during which time she was to be whipped in the
towns of Taunton, Glastonbury, Wells and Shepton Mallet. Sentence
was duly carried out, ‘ In the severity of the winter’.
The
Witches of Salem
Perhaps
the most famous witchcraft trials in history opened at Salem,
Massachusetts, in 1692. Ten young girls accused Tituba, West
Indian slave to a local preacher, of bewitching them. Under
flogging, Tituba falsely accused two confederates and a flood of
hysterical Charges and counter-charges ensued.
A
special court was set up to try the accused, but the judges
themselves succumbed to the mood of public panic and hundreds of
people were imprisoned: 14 women and 5 men were hanged, while
another person was pressed to death (crushed under weights —a
traditional punishment for those who refused to plead).
Before
the end of the year, the mania had subsided. The court was
dissolved, in May 1693, Governor Phelps ordered the release of all
prisoners held on witchcraft charges, and bereaved families
received compensation.
Boiling
to Death
.................................................................
The
great British poisoners of the last hundred years could count
themselves lucky that they did not live in an earlier era.
Horrible to relate, the capital punishment of boiling to death was
once on the statute book for poisoning. The act was passed under
Henry VIII in 1531, and the occasion was the trial of a man named
Richard Rosse (or Coke), who was alleged to have poisoned 17
people in the household of the bishop of Rochester, two of them, a
man and a woman died. Found guilty and duly sentenced, the cook
was publicly boiled at Smithfield.
Margaret
Davy, a young woman, suffered the same fate for a similar crime on
28 March 1542. The act was repealed five years later.
Fingers
of fate
Petty
criminals Alfred and Albert Stratton made British legal history
through their trial in May 1905. The brothers were the first
people ever convicted of murder by the evidence of fingerprints.
In
the course of a housebreaking, the Strattons had killed an elderly
Deptford shopkeeper and his wife. Alfred had left a clear
thumbprint on a rifled cash-box, and it was produced in evidence
at the Old Baily. In a fiercely contested forensic battle, a
defence expert pointed to certain discrepancies between
Stratton’s print and that found on the box. But the prosecution
replied that these were only minor differences resulting from the
thumb pressures applied. The point was dramatically illustrated
when jury members themselves had their prints repeatedly taken,
and discovered similar discrepancies.
The
jury was won over. Despite a cautious summing up from the judge on
the value of fingerprint evidence, the Strattons were found
guilty. They hanged together.
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The Law West Of The Pecos
.................................................................
Among the legendary judges of the past was whiskey, whiskey-sodden
Roy Bean, whose Texas saloon at Langtry comprised the ‘Law West
Of The Pecos’ for two decades. He often stopped trials to serve
liquor to the court, and once discharged one of his regulars
(accused of murdering a Mexican) on the grounds that ‘ it served
the deceased right for getting in front of a gun’. Thumbing
through his battered Texas Statutes, he discharged another
(accused of murdering a Chinese workman) on the grounds that ‘
they ain’t a damn line here nowheres that makes it illegal to
kill a Chinaman’.
The
Judge also did funerals and weddings. He once fined a corpse $40
for carrying a concealed weapon, and always concluded marriage
ceremonies with the words, ‘ May God have mercy on your soul.’
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