Denied by the Secretary of State
I had been at Aylesbury about eight months when I petitioned the Secretary of State for a reconsideration of my case, with a view to my release. To this I received the usual official reply, “Not sufficient grounds.”
A prisoner may petition the Secretary of State every three months. In my opinion, the privilege of petitioning on a case should be reduced from four times a year to once a year, with the provision that if anything of importance to a prisoner transpires within that period it may be duly submitted to the Secretary of State on recommendation of the governor or director;[146] that all complaints regarding food, treatment, or medical attention should be referred to the visiting director in the first instance, instead of the Secretary of State, who under the present system passes it back to the directors for the necessary investigation. This would do away with the continual daily distress and irritation and disappointment created in the prison on receipt of unfavorable replies from the Home Office. A prisoner petitions. A private inquiry is held, to which the prisoner is not a party, and of which she has no information, nor does she receive any during its progress or after its conclusion, save that the result, which is nearly always negative, is communicated to her. In this inquiry any one who is opposed to the prisoner may seek to influence the official mind. I will state a case in point. A friend asked the Secretary of State for the United States, the Hon. John Hay, to interest himself in my case. Mr. Hay replied that he had been informed by the[147] Home Office that I had been “a disobedient and troublesome prisoner.”
Report of My Misconduct Refuted
When I was told this at a visit I had my name entered to see the governor. I insisted that the governor should inform me when, and after what breach of the rules, such a report had been sent to the Home Office. After carefully looking through my penal record he could find no entry to that effect, and concluded by saying that I must have been misinformed. He said that my conduct was good, and that he had never made any report to the contrary. Obviously, therefore, this report from the Home Office to Mr. Hay was due to an adverse influence, of which I have still no knowledge. Statements are made against a prisoner, of the nature of which she is entirely ignorant. Being ignorant, she has no way of refuting them. Worse still, they are retained in the Home Office to her dying[148] day, and the unfortunate woman knows nothing of them or their effect. The only thing certain is that she is further condemned.
Need of a Court of Criminal Appeal
The Home Office, while exercising a private function of reconsideration grounded on the royal prerogative of mercy, emphatically disclaims being a court of appeal or a judicial tribunal in any sense of the word. Yet the consideration of a convict’s case rests alone with the Secretary of State. It is a matter of unwritten law that the Home Secretary shall act individually and solely upon his own responsibility, and none of his colleagues are to assume or take part therein.
There are numerous instances where judges, witnesses, and juries have gone wrong. Indeed, it will be found that even in cases which have seemed the clearest and least complicated in the trial grievous[149] mistakes have been made. But in England the blame rests on the public and the bar in that no means are provided to set the wrong right. What a difference it would have made in my life if I had been granted a second trial! I could have called other witnesses, submitted fresh evidence, and refuted false testimony. Is it not the climax of injustice that men and women, if sued for money, even for a few shillings, can appeal from court to court—even to the House of Lords, the English court of last resort; but when character, all that life holds dear, and life itself, are in jeopardy, a prisoner’s fate may depend upon the incompetent construction of one man, and there is no appeal?
A hard-worked Secretary of State, whose time, night and day, is crowded with every kind of duty, correspondence, and labor, in the House of Commons or in the Home Office, has to consider a vast number of petitions, complaints, and miscarriages of justice, or too severe sentences, any one[150] of which might require hours and sometimes days to investigate. He is assisted by several officers, but, strange to say, it is no part of their qualifications (or that of the Home Secretary himself), that they should be familiar with the criminal law or the prosecution or defense of prisoners. These permanent officials are, besides, occupied with hundreds of other matters which come before the Home Office, on which they have to guide their chief. Think of the untold sufferings of individuals and families, the shame and degradation which they would be spared, if England had a court of criminal appeal.
Historic Examples of British Injustice
The Home Office detects and corrects a larger number of erroneous verdicts than the public is aware. This arises from the secret and partial methods of remedying miscarriages of justice frequently adopted. The first object is to maintain[151] the public belief in the infallibility of judges and juries. If an innocent person could slip out quietly, without shaking this belief, he might be permitted to do so. The Home Secretary is, in fact, a politician, who has little time to spare for the consideration of criminal cases, and furthermore must see to it that his conduct does not injure his party. Thus he is often deterred from interfering with verdicts and sentences by sheer timidity. When he affirms a sentence he can throw the greater part of the blame on others if he is afterward proved to be wrong; but when he reverses either verdict or sentence, he must take the whole responsibility upon himself. This is, I believe, the true explanation of the secret and partial reversals which are not unusual at the Home Office. The Home Secretary, as well as his subordinates, must frequently let “dare not wait upon I would.”
If a crime is committed and no one is brought to justice, the police are blamed;[152] but if a person is convicted the police are praised, without regard as to whether the right person has been convicted. Hence there is usually a strong effort to beat up evidence against the person suspected, as in my case and that of Adolf Beck (see page 155), and to keep back anything in favor of the prisoner that comes to the knowledge of the police. When an appeal is made from the verdict to the Home Secretary, the first step is to consult the very judge who is responsible, in nine cases out of ten, for the erroneous verdict. It is easy to see that, where such reference is made, the judge is liable to be biased in support of his own rulings. How much more the ends of justice would be furthered by having the case retried!
God only knows how many men and women have been innocent of the charges brought against them, and for which they have been unjustly punished. I will mention a few only of many cases on record.
A man, Hebron by name, was convicted at Manchester, of murder. He was sentenced to death, but fortunately this was commuted to penal servitude for life. After serving two years the real murderer, a man named Peace, was discovered, and Hebron was “graciously pardoned.”
Another cruel case was that of John Kensall, who was convicted of murder, but, through action taken by the late Lord Chief Justice Russell, was shown to be innocent. The Home Office could not at first “see its way to interfere,” and had it not been for Lord Russell’s clear head and splendid generalship, by which the authorities at the Home Office were outwitted, he would not have been released so soon.
The case of the man Hay, wrongly convicted, was of a serious nature, showing that he was the victim of a conspiracy; yet had it not been for Sir William Harcourt’s instituting an investigation independent of the Home Office, it is very doubtful whether Hay would have been[154] able to establish his innocence. But he did so, and a pardon was granted him.
It looks almost as if justice in England were growing of late more than ordinarily blind. Thrice, within three years, has the Home Secretary’s “pardon” been granted to men found to have been wrongfully convicted.
The average man takes it for granted that these hideous mistakes must, of necessity, be few and far between; but the criminologist knows better. He, at all events, is well aware that every year a number of innocent people are sentenced to suffer either an ignominious death upon the scaffold, or the long-drawn-out living death of penal servitude.
Many of these judicial miscarriages never come to light at all. Others are purposely glossed over by the powers that be. But occasionally one occurs of so appalling a nature that it rivets the attention and shocks the conscience of the entire civilized world, as in the case of Adolf Beck.
The Case of Adolf Beck
Adolf Beck was twice convicted for crimes committed by a man who somewhat resembled him. He served his first sentence and had been convicted for a second crime on “misrepresented identity” when his innocence was providentially established. The case is too lengthy for detailed account in these pages, and I shall content myself in giving the summing-up of Mr. George R. Sims in the pamphlet reprinted from his presentation of the case in the columns of The Daily Mail of London:
“I have told in plain words the story of a foul wrong done to an innocent man.
“I have proved beyond all question that Adolf Beck was in 1896, by the Common Sergeant, Sir Forrest Fulton, at the Old Bailey, sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude for being an ex-convict named John Smith.
“I have proved that he was not found guilty of being John Smith by the jury.
“The former conviction for which Mr. Adolf Beck was sentenced and punished was not only never submitted to the jury, but they were warned by the judge that they were not to take the issue of Beck being Smith into consideration in arriving at their verdict. They were to dismiss it completely from their minds.
“I have proved that if this issue had been left for the jury to consider they must have acquitted Mr. Beck, who showed by an indisputable alibi that he could not be Smith, the man convicted in 1877.
“I have proved that this terrible mockery of justice, the conviction of an innocent man for a series of crimes that it was quite impossible he could have committed, was brought about by the action of the leading counsel for the Treasury, which action was supported by the Common Sergeant, Sir Forrest Fulton.
“I have proved that the evidence of the policeman, Eliss Spurrell, which was used at the police-court to assist in getting Beck committed for trial, was kept out at the Old Bailey, where it would have insured Beck’s acquittal.
“I have proved that at the police-court in 1896 Mr. Gurrin, the Treasury expert, reported that all the documents connected with the 1896 frauds were in the handwriting of John Smith of 1877.
“I have proved that at the 1896 trial at the Old Bailey Mr. Gurrin swore that, to the best of his belief, all the documents were in the disguised handwriting of Mr. Beck.
“I have proved that no one in his senses could at the trial have accepted the theory that Adolf Beck was John Smith after listening to the evidence of Major Lindholm, Gentleman of the Chamber to the King of Denmark, Col. Josiah Harris, and the Consul-General for Peru at Liverpool.
“The Common Sergeant accepted as true their evidence of a complete alibi for Mr. Beck, so far as 1877 and the years Smith was in prison were concerned, or he would, it is to be presumed, have taken measures to have those gentlemen prosecuted for committing wilful and corrupt perjury in order to defeat the ends of justice.
“I have proved that Beck, after his imprisonment,[158] compelled the Home Office authorities to acknowledge that he was not Smith, and to admit the physical impossibility of his being Smith—Smith was a Jew, and he, Beck, was not—and that therefore, by the evidence of the Treasury witnesses, he had been wrongfully committed.
“I have proved that Beck was stripped and officially examined for body marks before his trial, in order that such marks might be compared with those on the record in the possession of the authorities as the body marks of John Smith.
“I have proved that Adolf Beck had none of the body marks of John Smith, the man in whose handwriting Mr. Gurrin had declared the incriminating documents of 1896 to be.
“I have proved that all the petitions setting forth these facts and others, which fully established Beck’s innocence, met with no consideration.
“I have proved that when the frauds of 1877 and 1896 were repeated in 1904, and the incriminating documents were found to be in the handwriting of 1877, stroke for[159] stroke, peculiarity for peculiarity, almost word for word, the fact that the authorities had admitted that Mr. Beck could not be the author of the 1877 frauds or the writer of the 1877 documents was utterly ignored, and the responsible authorities, with every proof of Mr. Beck’s innocence in their possession, allowed him to be arrested, charged, tried, and convicted again.
“I have proved that the identification of Mr. Beck by the female witnesses as the man who robbed them was a monstrous farce.
“I have proved that, so far from Mr. Beck being the ‘double’ of John Smith, he was utterly unlike him, except that each had a gray mustache. Beck had neither the noticeable scar at the point of the jaw nor the noticeable wart over one eye that are striking marks of identity in John Smith—marks which would not escape the most casual observer.
“I have proved that Beck’s conviction in 1896 was secured by a device which was utterly unworthy of a British court of justice—a device so unfair and unjust that an innocent and inoffensive foreigner, a Norwegian[160] who had sought the hospitality of our shores, was by its employment sent into penal servitude for seven years for the crimes of another man.
“I have proved that Mr. Beck was in 1904 convicted of repeating letter for letter, word for word, trick for trick, check for check, false address for false address, false name for false name, the frauds of 1877 and 1896, of which the authorities had absolute proof that he was innocent, and of which, though they had never remitted one day of his sentence, they had admitted that he was innocent.
“I have been careful to keep to the main issue, and have refrained from examining the side issues, some of which reveal most lamentable features in connection with our criminal procedure.
“I will prove one thing more, and leave the facts I have established to the judgment of the public.
“At the end of the report of the second trial of Adolf Beck, which took place at the Old Bailey on June 27, 1904 (Sessions Paper CXL., Part 837), are these words, printed as I give them below:
“‘GUILTY. He then PLEADED GUILTY to a conviction of obtaining goods by false pretenses at this Court on February 26, 1896. Judgment respited.’
“Pleaded guilty to a former conviction! Adolf Beck pleaded guilty to nothing. How could he plead guilty, being an innocent man! He cried aloud when the charge of the first conviction was read aloud to him, ‘As God is my witness, I was innocent then as I am innocent now.’
“The epilogue to the tragedy of our English Dreyfus is written in those damning words in the Sessions Paper, the official minutes of evidence in Central Criminal Court trials.
“Beck’s last hope had perished. Once more a merciless fate had blinded the eyes and closed the ears of Justice to his innocence. He was to be immured in a convict cell for ten, perhaps for fourteen, years; he was to pass the closing years of his life a branded felon amid all the horrors of a convict prison. In all human probability he would die without ever seeing the light of freedom again, for he could not have borne this second torture.
“His voice, crying aloud for freedom, would be heard no more. Petitions for a reinvestigation of his case would be hopeless. He had been robbed of his last earthly chance of proving his innocence.
“Those words, ‘The prisoner pleaded guilty to a former conviction,’ would have damned him to the last day of his life.
“My painful task is ended.
“A foreigner, a stranger within our gates, a man of kindly heart and gentle ways, has been foully wronged. There is but one reparation we can make him. The people of this country owe him a testimonial of sympathy that shall endure and remain. On the site of his martyrdom there should rise a national monument. Let that monument take the form of a Court of Criminal Appeal. That is the one reparation that the English people can make to Adolf Beck for the foul wrong he has suffered in their midst.”
In a sense the innocent man who is hanged may be regarded as better off than he who is called upon to endure lifelong imprisonment. There are plenty of examples[163] of these judicial murders. Over a score of undoubted cases occurred in the first two decades of the last century, and since then there have been twice as many more. A notorious and awful case was that of Eliza Fenning, who, at eighteen years of age, was sent to the gallows upon the perjured evidence of an accomplice of the real murderer. The latter afterward confessed.
Another similar case occurred in 1850, when a man named Ross was executed for poisoning his young wife by mixing arsenic with her food. A few years later certain facts came to light, proving conclusively that the real criminal was a female acquaintance and confidante of the dead woman.
Thomas Perryman, again, was found guilty in 1879 of the murder of his aged mother on the very flimsiest of evidence. His sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life, and in the ordinary course of events he should now be free. More than 100,000 people have, at different times,[164] petitioned for the release of this convict, and the highest judicial authorities have expressed their belief in his entire innocence of the crime imputed to him. Yet he has been compelled to drink his terrible cup to the bitter dregs.
In 1844 a gentleman named Barker was sentenced to penal servitude for life for a forgery of which he was afterward proved to have been wholly innocent. He served four years, and was then released and readmitted to practise as an attorney. In 1859, eleven years after having been “pardoned,” he was, upon the recommendation of a select Committee of the House of Commons, voted a sum of ￡5,000, “as a national acknowledgment of the wrong he had suffered from an erroneous prosecution.”
The famous Edlingham case will doubtless be fresh in the minds of most people. In February, 1879, the village vicarage was entered by burglars, and a determined attempt was made to murder the aged incumbent.[165] For this outrage two men, Brannagham and Murphy, were sentenced to lifelong imprisonment. After a lapse of nine years the crime was confessed to by two well-known criminals named Richardson and Edgell, the result being that the innocent convicts were released, with an honorarium of ￡800 apiece.
The eminent King’s Counsel, Sir George Lewis, has openly said that he will not allow himself to speak of the way in which the “Edalji” trial was conducted, and he further adds: “I have it on undoubted authority that every ‘M.P.’ connected with the legal profession believes as I do that that man is innocent. And yet a declaration from such a source is allowed by the public to pass unnoticed. As I have before stated, ‘it is not the business of the public, nor of individual citizens, to prove the innocence of any unhappy person whom the process of law selects for punishment; but it is the business of every citizen to see that the courts incontestably[166] prove the guilt of any person accused of a crime before sentence is passed.’ Neither condition was fulfilled in the case of the prisoner. I have studied the evidence, and say, from knowledge gained by fifteen years’ association with criminals, that this unfortunate young man is innocent.” Surely after the disclosures of the Adolf Beck case this one, on the word of Sir George Lewis, ought to receive unbiased consideration from the Home Office.