Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 68, No 422, December 1850Various
General
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 68, No 422, December 1850
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
there is any evidence to prove that the gentleman wounded on Wimbledon
Common bears the name and surname of 'Harvey Garnett Phipps Tuckett?'"
The Lord High Steward, during the deliberation of the House with closed
doors, delivered a luminous and convincing exposition of the legal
merits of the case before the House:--
"There is an absolute want of circumstances to connect the individual
at whom the pistol was fired, and who afterwards was seen wounded in
Hamilton Place, with the half-pay officer known to Mr Codd as bearing
the names set forth in the indictment on which your Lordships are
sitting in judgment; for the mere fact of the wounded person bearing
_some_ of the names used by the half-pay officer, is no proof that
the former and the latter are the same; and the representation by
that officer of his having held a commission in the same regiment of
which Lord Cardigan told the policeman that he himself was colonel,
(which, coupled with the actual receipt of half-pay, may sufficiently
prove that fact,) cannot, I apprehend, be turned into a presumption
that those two individuals would meet in hostile array. Here are two
distinct lines of testimony, and they never meet in the same point."
* * * * *
"No fact (_i. e._ of identity) is easier of proof in its own nature;
and numerous witnesses are always at hand to establish it, with respect
to any person conversant with society. In the present case, the
simplest means were accessible. If those who conduct the prosecution
had obtained your Lordships' order for the appearance at your bar of
Captain Tuckett, and if the witnesses of the duel had deposed to his
being the man who left the field after receiving Lord Cardigan's shot,
Mr Codd might have been asked whether that was the gentleman whom he
knew by the four names set forth in the indictment. His answer in the
affirmative would have been too conclusive on the point to admit of the
present objection being taken.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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