THE MAYBRICK CASE.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 12728, 11 April 1904, Page 4

THE MAYBRICK CASE.

The conditions of the release of Mrs Maybrick, laid upon the table of the House of Commons, seem in the circumstances a little brutal in their language (says a London correspondent). They contain, of course, the usual formula of ticket-of-leave drafted to meet the case of the worst, most degraded criminals. The distinction drawn to unhappy woman’s dolour is that in ordinary cases the document is not published to the world. Her release has revived the old controversy as to the actuality of her guilt. Some years ago, meeting Lord Llandatf among the weekend party at a country house, he related to me an interesting circumstance bearing upon the problem. It will be remembered that he, at the time Henry Matthews, was Home Secretary, when sentence was passed upon Mrs Maybrick. Appeal for her release, backed by the powerful advocacy of Charles Russell, subsequently Lord Chief Justice of England, coming-before him, he provided himself with transcription of a shorthand report of the trial, shut himself up in his office for two days, devoting his acute, trained mind to consideration of the case. He came to it wholly unbiased, save perhaps tor the natural tendency to, rescue the woman from the gallows, if rescue might honestly be effected. The conclusion he came to was that Mrs Maybrick had deliberately, systematically, attempted to poison her husband. He commuted the sentence of death on the specific ground of doubt as to whether death was the direct result of her efforts. It was proved in court that Mr Maybrick had for a long time been accustomed to take arsenic for medicinal purposes, and there was a shadow of uncertainty whether death was not due to his overdoing it. That Mrs Maybrick administered poison with felonious intent Lord Llandaff had not the remotest doubt.

In this view, arrived at by analogous process, he was not alone among Home Secretaries. When he went out with Lord Salisbury’s Government in 189J4 Mr Asquith was appointed his successor. The American Minister to this court, urged by a wave ol public opinion in the United States, promptly approached the new Home Secretary with a demand for the release of Mrs Maybrick. Mr Asquith followed the course adopted by his predecessor. He sent for all the papers and evidence connected with the case, gave them his fullest consideration, and arrived at the same conclusion as Mr Henry Matthews had reached. Sir Matthew White Ridley and Mr Ritchie, following in succession at the Home Office, found the same task imposed upon them by the faithfulness of Mrs Maybrick’s Am mean friends. The same result followed. The convict has now been released, not from any doubt piercing the Home Secretary’s mind as to her guilt, but in the ordinary process of the shortening of her sentence owing to good behaviour whilst in prison.