MISTAKEN IDENTITY

Lake County Press, Issue 976, 22 August 1901, Page 7

MISTAKEN IDENTITY

There are not many free men who have gone through the ordeal of a murder trial. The condition of such a man is without a parallel for horror. No man in any other conceivable position looks forward to a certain fixed date as likely to be his last. Yet this terrible torture has been endured by men and women who have done no harm at all to bring them within the just reach of the law. An extraordinary case was recalled by some civil proceedings in Ireland last year. A man had been missing for years, and his disappearance was distinctly traceable to the fact that his mind had been unhinged by a charge of murder which he had had to answer, an 4 of which he was as innocent as if he had not been born. The man had left Ireland in 1873, and had become a soldier in the American Army. He was living an honorable soldiers’ life in North Carolina when, in 1888, he was suddenly arrested for the murder of his wife and child! It was nothing that he protested that be was Robert Leeson Porter; the police insisted that lie was Scott Parton, who had killed his wife and child twelve years before at Raleigh, U.S., and afterwards disappeared. It transpired that there was a remarkable resemblance between the two men, but it was only with the utmost possible difficulty that Porter proved his innocence. When the case was over he disappeared from his old haunts, and from that day to this, though twelve years have come and gone, he has been as dead to his friends. It is terrible to think that any one of us may be mistaken to-morrow for somebody else who has brought down the last vengeance of the law upon him. In the sixteen hundred millions of human beings on the face of the earth it would not be easy to find two who have not some point of resemblance, and it is not singular that there should be many unrelated twins as much alike as a man is like his own image. A pitiful example of the peril in which we all live came within the experience of the late Mr Montague Williams. He had defended a man at the Middlesex sessions against whom two policemen, a butcher, and a drover gave the strongest possible evidence that they had seen bun steal some sheep. The man’s mother, sister, and child were called to give evidence that the prisoner was at home at the time of the theft, but the Judge waived aside their story by warning the jury that an alibi was* “so easily arranged,” and the man was convicted and sentenced. Twelve months passed, and “ Monty ” was again defending a man for sheep-stealing, oddly enough before the same Judge. The resemblance of the prisoner to the client of the year before puzzled the famous lawyer exceedingly. Mr Williams lost his case; the man was found guilty, and on hearing the verdict he stood up in the dock, inspired by the rough sense of honor which governs thieves, and declared that it was he who had committed the crime for which another man had been sentenced a year before. The Judge was sceptical, but the man’s story was found to be true, and ‘lie innocent prisoner was pardoned. Fate Rad dealt unkindly with him, however. He found his freedom, but he found, too, a wife in her grave and children in the workhouse ; and, as if his sorrows were not enough, he, had. to wait longer than was just for the compensation which should have met him at: the prison gate, and when it came at last his reason had left him, and he was once again a prisoner—raving in a madhouse.