PRISONER'S EVIDENCE.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXXIV, Issue 11128, 21 January 1899, Page 5

PRISONER'S EVIDENCE.

Availing himself o£ the recent amendment of the Victorian law which enables accused persons to give evidence on their own behalf a man named M'Dermott, while on trial at the Melbourne general sessions in September on charge of housebreaking, elected to be sworn, and denied that he was near the scene of the housebreaking on the date alleged. The jury disagreed, and he was retired at the October sittings. The same evidence was called ; the accused on oath denied the charge and was [ acquitted by thejury. His troubles , were not at an end, however, for he was then prosecuted on a charge of j perjury, and was brought up for j trial in the criminal Court recently. ; The Grown case was that while j giving evidence on. his owa behalf j at the first trial the accused falsely , swore that he had not been at Carrum, the scene of the housebreaking, since 30th October, 1897, and that' he was not at the house, or within miles of: it, on the sth j November, 1897, the date^ of the j alleged offence. The solicitor for the defence urged that the question involved had really been decided in accused's favor by the verdict of the jury in the housebreaking case, and that the present proceedings were practically an abuse of the system oi : trial by jury. Mr Justice A'Becket, in summing up, said thejury should dismiss from their minds all thought of what the previous jury had done, and give a verdict according to their own view of the evidence. 'When the Crown had reason to believe that an accused person had imposed upon a jury, and so obtained a verdict in his favor, it was a duty which it owed to the community to prosecute that person on a charge of perjury. After the jury had retired, accused's solicitor applied to His Honor to reserve for the opinion of the Full Court the question whether, in view of the i act that the same witnesses were called, and substantially the same point decided at , the trial for housebreaking, in which I the prisoner was acquitted, the Crown should not be bound hy the ! fjnding of tije jury on that occasion ; or that in tie alternative, the case should have been withdrawn from thejury. The judge intimated that he proposed -to reserve these questions. The jury returned a verdict of guilty, and prisoner was remanded, for sentence.