THE VERDICT OF AN AUCKLAND JURY.

Evening Post, Volume XXXVI, Issue 102, 27 October 1888, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE VERDICT OF AN AUCKLAND JURY.

Curious stories have been often told respecting the doing of juries when locked up to consider their verdict, but the following novel mode of coming to a decision, if not now, is at least amusing. As it would spoil the story to print it otherwise than as related, we give it in the man's own words : — " Gentlemen," Baid the speaker to a company of us who had assembled at Walker's Imperial Hotel, chatting over old times, " I was pursuing the even tenor of my way when I found myself in Auckland, carrying on the peaceful avocation of land agent, including the lucrative business of supplying the rebel Maoris with leaden sash weights, wax matches, and eyelets." " What was that for ?" demanded one of the company. "Well, you see," was the calm reply, " gunpowder, bullets and percussion caps were contraband articles of war at the time, and I had no desire for a neck-stretcher at the hands of Sir Duncan Cameron. It was before Rangiriri, gentlemen. So I instructed the Maoris how to make rifle bullets out of sash weights, and you would scarcely believe how admirably the tops of wax matches, cut off and inserted into eyelet holes, answered the purpose of percussion capp. But to return to my subject. One day a constable paid me a visit, with a summons for a jury. I went, saw, and got run into the box with eleven others. We were empanelled to try two Maoris, Hori Taka and Matui, for 'wiping out a settler's family up the Waikato Elver. The main part of the evidence was that of the only survivor, a boy of about 15 years of age, who had been tomahawked and left for dead, but who distinctly swore to the two men in the dock as being the slaughterers of his relatives. 'The judge (old Sir George Arney) charged us dead against the niggers, and we retired to consider our verdict. Now, I was doing a big business with the natives at that time, and it wouldn't do for me to be one of a dozen that scragged two promising specimens of the race. Five other jurymen, for business reasons, held the same view of the matter; but the remaining six jurymen, including the foreman, were going in for a conviction straight. We wrangled, smoked, sang songs, swore, and danced, and tried various other ways to pass the time ; but there we were at o o'clock, six of one and half-a-dozen of the other. At last the judge sent in word that if we could not come to an agreement at 10 o'clock, we should be locked up all night. That fixed our foreman's flint. He was a master Btonemason, and he had the contract for a new brick building under way, and, in consequence, had somewhere about fifty bricklayers and stonemasons working for him. "Look a-here," he said. "It's plain we can't agree. We're too evenly divided for that. Now, I'll tell you what it is. If I am locked up to-night" — it was Saturday afternoon — " I'll lose a lot of money. Now, I'll tell you what we'll do. We will toss up for it — guilty or not guilty— and I'll stand a supper afterwards all round at the Freemason's Hqtel." Suiting the action to the word, he out off a button from his flannel jacket. It was one of those big mother-o'-pearl buttons, common on such articles, black on one side and white on the other. Selecting me as the champion of the " not guilty crowd " — the foreman was straight for hanging 'cm — "he continued — "Now, then we're all agreeable, if it turns up black the niggers goes loose; if white, they swings. TJp she goes." I looked at the button

Ho see that all was fair. Up spun the said button, and it came down black. "We went into court again. " Gentlemen of the jury, are sou all agreed upon your verdict ?" said old O'Brien, the judge's associote. " We is," said the foreman. "How say you, gentlemen of the jury, do you find the prisoners at the bar guilty or not guilty ?" asked the deputy beak. " Not guilty." They were then turned loose, and on getting outside of the precincts of the court, they started rubbing noses with a large and sympathising concourse of relatives and friends. Next day I saw them selling peaches abo.ut the streets. "But were they guilty?" asked one of the company. " Well, it so turned out that they were not," replied our friend the narrator. "Three days afterwards the real culprits were taken with a mob of others at King's Redoubt, and a swagsman who had been hiding in the bush at the time when the tomahawking of the settler's family was going on, came forward and identified them by a peculiar pattern tattooed on their arms — the mark of the Ngaruawahia chiefs. "What a fortunate interposition of Providence in favour of the innocent!" exclaimed one in our midst. " Yes," said the narrator of the above story quietly. "I had the handling of that button, you see, just before it was shied up. I had also somo liquid lampblack in my coat pocket, and I shouldn't wonder that if the white side of that button got a little bit smutted in the excitement and confusion." We thank our friend the ex-land-agent, and one by one sailed into the bar to " wet our whistles " ere returning to Te Aroha, a goldfield district near Auckland.