The Chronicles of Crime or The New Newgate Calendar. v. 2/2: being a series of memoirs and anecdotes of notorious characters who have outraged the laws of Great Britain from the earliest period to 1841Pelham, Camden
History
The Chronicles of Crime or The New Newgate Calendar. v. 2/2: 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)
"I am asked, my lord, what I have to say that judgment of death should
not be passed upon me according to law. This to me is mockery--for were
the reasons I could offer incontrovertible, and were they enforced even
by the eloquence of a Cicero, still would the vengeance of my Lords
Castlereagh and Sidmouth be satiated only in the purple stream which
circulates through a heart more enthusiastically vibrating to every
impulse of patriotism and honour, than that of any of those privileged
traitors to their country, who lord it over the lives and property of
the sovereign people with barefaced impunity. The reasons which I have,
however, I will now state--not that I entertain the slightest hope from
your sense of justice or from your pity.--The former is swallowed up in
your ambition, or rather by the servility you descend to, to obtain the
object of that ambition--the latter I despise; justice I demand; if I am
denied it, your pity is no equivalent. In the first place, I protest
against the proceedings upon my trial, which I conceive to be grossly
partial, and contrary to the very spirit of justice; but, alas! the
judges, who have heretofore been considered the counsel of the accused,
are now, without exception, in all cases between the crown and the
people, the most implacable enemies of the latter.--In every instance,
the judges charge the jury to find the subject guilty; nay, in one
instance, the jury received a reprimand, and that not in the genteelest
terms, for not strictly obeying the imperious mandate from the bench.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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