conjunction with a third person who had no connection with the other two. But if the Public Prosecutor were in a situation to prove one of these murders, it would infer the death of the pannel. Then for what end or purpose of public justice were three murders crammed into one indictment? If the Prosecutor was unable to prove any one of them, there was no necessity surely for putting it into this indictment. Suppose evidence were brought to prove the first, but totally failed, and the second, but also failed, or at least left them in such doubt that a verdict of not guilty or not proven would have been returned if they had been tried separately; nobody would maintain that a false or improbable charge might not become a make-weight in the evidence to prove a separate and distinct murder. The prisoner might take his trial on a combination of such charges, but unless your Lordship interfered _ex parte judicis_, the result would be what he described. The prejudice arose from this _talis qualis_ accession, not proved, but assumed; and from the prejudice thus credited the prisoner might be convicted. They could not lay the present indictment before a Jury without necessarily prejudicing that Jury; and yet the Lord Advocate came forward and alleged that he thought the whole objection frivolous and untenable, saying that it was an attempt to smother the indictment altogether; that is, he called an objection to an indictment, which did not contain a specific allegation of a specific crime, but a congeries of offences huddled together and charged _in cumulo_, an attempt to smother it! How smothered? If the indictment was improperly framed, if two or three charges were crammed into it instead of one, the prisoner was entitled to have it smothered. He was entitled to a fair trial, and if the libel was so constructed that this could not be afforded him, he had a right to have it smothered. Every thing relative to a specific charge their Lordships would receive, if brought forward in a competent form; but the point previously adverted to still returned--Were they to receive evidence in regard to two charges which might not be proved, and which yet might affect the minds of the Jury in regard to the third and lead to a conviction? The Learned Lord indeed said, that there was only one sort of evidence, and that the crime had been committed in the same place. But the place was not the same; in fact, the _loci_ were as distinct as if the one crime had been committed in the Canongate of Edinburgh and the other in the remotest corner of Scotland. In popular language and popular conceptions, they might be held and represented as the same, but this would never do in matters of law. They must have the _locus_ strictly libelled. Nor was the time the same. The first was committed at the distance of six months from the second: the first took place in April, another took place in the beginning of October, and a third occurred in the end of October.