The Chronicles of Crime or The New Newgate Calendar. v. 1/2: being a series of memoirs and anecdotes of notorious characters who have outraged the laws of Great Britain from the earliest period to 1841.Pelham, Camden
History
The Chronicles of Crime or The New Newgate Calendar. v. 1/2: being a series of memoirs and anecdotes of notorious characters who have outraged the laws of Great Britain from the earliest period to 1841.
Pelham, Camden
Crime -- Great Britain; Criminals -- Great Britain; Newgate (Prison : London, England)
The delivery of this address created a very considerable impression in
court; but the learned judge having calmly and with great perspicuity
summed up the evidence which had been produced, and having observed upon
the prisoner's defence, which he declared to be one of the most
ingenious pieces of reasoning that had ever fallen under his notice, the
jury, with little hesitation, returned a verdict of Guilty. Sentence of
death was then passed upon the prisoner, who received the intimation of
his fate with becoming resignation. After his conviction, he confessed
the justice of his sentence to two clergymen who were directed to attend
him--a sufficient proof of the fruitlessness of the efforts to prove him
innocent, which the morbid sentimentality of late writers has induced
them to attempt. Upon an inquiry being made of him as to his reason for
committing the crime, he declared that he had reason to suspect Clarke
of having had unlawful intercourse with his wife; and that at the time
of his committing the murder he had thought that he was acting rightly,
but that he had since thought that his crime could not be justified or
excused. In the hopes of avoiding the ignominious death which he was
doomed to suffer, on the night before his execution he attempted to
commit suicide by cutting his arm in two places with a razor, which he
had concealed for that purpose. This attempt was not discovered until
the morning, when the jailor came to lead him forth to the place of
execution, and he was then found almost expiring from loss of blood. A
surgeon was immediately sent for, who found that he had wounded himself
severely on the left arm, above the elbow and near the wrist, but he had
missed the artery, and his life was prolonged only in order that it
might be taken away on the scaffold. When he was placed on the drop, he
was perfectly sensible, but was too weak to be able to join in devotion
with the clergyman who attended him He was executed at York on the 16th
August 1759; and his body was afterwards hung in chains in Knaresborough
Forest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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