The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney — John Shaqi
The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an AttorneyWarren, Samuel
General
The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney
Warren, Samuel
Detective and mystery stories, English; Legal stories, English
Harvey was arraigned in due form; the evidence was gone carefully
through; and everything, so far as I was concerned, was done that man
could do. But at the time to which I refer, counsel was not allowed to
address the court on behalf of the prisoner--a practice since introduced
from Scotland--and consequently I was allowed no opportunity to draw the
attention of the jury to the total want of any direct evidence of the
prisoner's guilt. Harvey himself tried to point out the unlikelihood of
his being guilty; but he was not a man gifted with dialectic qualities,
and his harangue fell pointless on the understandings of the twelve
common-place individuals who sat in the jury-box. The judge finally
proceeded to sum the evidence, and this he did emphatically _against_ the
prisoner--dwelling with much force on the suspicious circumstance of a
needy man taking up his abode at an expensive fashionable hotel; his
furtive descent from his apartments by the back stairs; the undoubted
fact of the watch being found in his trunk; the improbability of any one
putting it there but himself; and the extreme likelihood that the robbery
was effected in a few moments of time by the culprit, just as he passed
from the bar of the hotel to the room which he had occupied. "If," said
he to the jury, in concluding his address, "you can, after all these
circumstances, believe the prisoner to be innocent of the crime laid to
his charge, it is more than I can do. The thing seems to me as clear as
the sun at noonday. The evidence, in short, is irresistible; and if the
just and necessary provisions of the law are not enforced in such very
plain cases, then society will be dissolved, and security for property
there will be none. Gentlemen, retire and make up your verdict."
The jury were not disposed to retire. After communing a few minutes
together, one of them stood up and delivered the verdict: it was
_Guilty!_ The judge assumed the crowning badge of the judicial
potentate--the black cap; and the clerk of arraigns asked the prisoner at
the bar, in the usual form, if he had anything to urge why sentence of
death should not be passed upon him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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