The Speaker, Vol. 4

Excerpt from The Speaker, Vol. 4: August 8, 1891 But it must be confessed that the example of Mr. Justice Grantham is not an incentive to Optimism. Here is a man of the world, whose professional career ought to have taught him the impropriety of hasty judgment, and the expediency of a careful sifting of motives. His judicial Office was the reward of a partisan, and he has shown his gratitude by frequent hints that his political opponents ought to be always in the dock. But as his ordinary business ought to distract his mind from the enormities of the Liberal party, and as he cannot regard every prisoner tried before him as a conspirator against the blessed prin ciples of a Tory Government, it might be presumed that he would usually be guided by a reasonable view of the evidence. A recent case at Leeds disposes of this illusion, and shows that Mr. Justice Grantham cannot be counted upon for amore lambent wisdom than illuminates the rural bench. A man named Turner brutally murdered a child, and concealed the body in his mother's house. When she discovered it, she helped him to conceal the traces of his crime, but in a few days confessed everything to the police. By some peculiarity of procedure which will be duly noted by 'foreign experts, Mrs. Turner was tried first. The accessory after the fact was called to account before the fact had been judicially established. This indict ment of the cart before the horse produced a curious effect upon Mr. Justice Grantham's mind. The accessory loomed upon him with altogether dis proportionate guilt. It was not shown that Mrs. Turner had any taste for hiding the bodies of murdered children. She simply did what most mothers would have done in her place. She acted on the first impulse to do all in her power to screen her son. But the re sponsibility was too heavy; the horror of the deed asserted its moral supremacy, and the unfortunate woman gave the criminal up to justice. Now if there ever was a case which demanded the most careful consideration of the requirements of law and the dictates of mercy, it was this submission of a mother's natural affection to the authority which exacted vengeance for a crime. Even if she had done her utmost to protect her son to the last, she would have been an Object of the deepest commisera tion. Murderer as he was, she might have argued that it was not for her to give him up. Common humanity would claim a distinction between such a position and that of an ordinary accessory. But Mrs. Turner confessed, and so aided the law to punish a crime for which she was in no sense responsible. If she shielded her son for a time, she made full amends for that offence. To treat an accessory in such circumstances as a criminal of the worst type was an achievement from which even a rural magistrate of the o most purblind class might have recoiled. But Mr. Justice Grantham did not hesitate to embrace this Odium by im posing the heaviest sentence short Of the gallows. This woman was condemned to penal servitude for life, as if she had done something which was only one degree less infamous than the capital crime. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.