A SENTENCE OF FIVE MINUTES FOR BIGAMY.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXII, Issue 7785, 2 July 1887, Page 4

A SENTENCE OF FIVE MINUTES FOR BIGAMY.

At the assizes fc the counties of Leicester and Derby, which were held at , Derby on the 9th May, before Mr Jnstice Hawkins, Mary Ann Biley pleaded s u i''.V to an indictment charging'herwitli manying William Robinson, at Leicester, in .February, 1883, her former husband, to whom she was married on July 14, 1579, being the» alive. Counsel for the prosecution, in reply to his lordship, said : there were undoubtedly circumstances of provocation. His lordship said lig thought the magistrates might have exercised a discretion and declined to send the "ase for trial, or at any rate applied to the Attorney-General, as a prosecution of tkis woman was simply outrageous. In his reply, to the judge, the accused said she was now living in lodgings at Coalville. Proceeding to pass sentence, his lordship said prisoner was married in 1879 to a man named Riley, twenty-two years of age, who treated her very cruelly. He was guilty of about as cruel an outrage on her as man could could possibly be guilty of. He got into t'aol, and when he came out he deserted her. Afterwards she married another man named Hobinson, who also treated her cruelly, and tken, according to her statement', they arranged . together to' prosecute her for bigamy. Now- there were cases in which he (the judge) had passed sentences of penal servitude for this offence, but he was convinced that the law against bigamy was never intended to apply to such cases as hers. Formally ho ordered her to be imprisoned for five minutes. The effcet of that was that she would be discharged instantly.