The Lyttelton Times. MONDAY, MARCH 21, 1887.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LXVII, Issue 8123, 21 March 1887, Page 4

The Lyttelton Times. MONDAY, MARCH 21, 1887.

Should the admitted failure of justice in the Hall case lead to an amendment of the New Zealand law of evidence, the repetition of such unfortunate miscarriages will he prevented, but the case itself will remain au example of the law’s ineffectiveness. There is one way to avoid this, and, so far as we know, only one. That way is, for the Crown to appeal to the Privy Council. The Crown has been badly treated. After working up a most difficult and important case with great care and at very considerable cost to the country, it has been baffled by an over-cautious Bench, whose view of the case-law of evidence, as now made in England, is, in our opinion, erroneous. The nicety of the point, and the undoubted conflict of previous decisions on the point does not niter the fact that our Court of Appeal has weighed the matter wrongly in the balance. It is one thing to point out the absurdity of blaming our Judges indignantly for taking a justifiable view of so fine a point. It is quite another thing to agree with them in the view they took. As their view has led not merely to widespread dissatisfaction but to, what is infinitely more important, a grave injustice, there is substantial reason for asking to have the matter remitted to the supreme tribunal of the Empire. A decision by the Privy Council on the validity of Hall’s conviction would probably be as interesting and important to the legal profession at Home as here. We are not aware that the decisions on which the Crown relied in Hall’s case —for instance, the decisions in Geering’s and Garner’s case—have ever been reviewed by an English Superior Court, This absence of supreme authority made one of the difficulties in our Court’s path. If our AttorneyGeneral were to carry the matter to the Privy Council, the result would probably be that such absence of authority would no longer exist. The Privy Council might, of course, if it chose, decline to allow the Attorney-General to appeal. Appeals to it from Colonial Courts are rare in criminal trials. No provision for such appeals appears in our Court of Appeal Act. But that Her Majesty’s Privy Council has an inherent prerogative power to entertain such appeals is settled law. The Council laid this down clearly whoix it allowed the Attorney-General of

New South Wales to appeal to it against the decision of the Supreme Court of that Colony in Bel tram’s case, Beltram was a murderer; the Supreme Court thought that his conviction was bad on account of some technical error in the reception of evidence; it directed a new trial. The Privy Council decided that the Supreme Court had no power so to act. In another New South Wales case, Murphy’s case, almost the same process was gone through, and again the Privy Council decided against the Supreme Court. The Council has stated that it will not lightly exercise its prerogative of interference with Colonial Criminal Courts, but that if the matter in question is important, and likely to affect justice in! the future it will interfere. In just the same way the Privy Council is slow to meddle with the administration of French law in Lower Canada (Quebec), but will do so if sufficient cause be shown. We hardly think that any lawyer will deny that the rules of evidence in question in Hall’s case are of the very greatest importance. The evidence of Hall’s conduct to his wife bore most of all on the' question of Cain’s murder, as showing design. Hardly an intelligent being in this Colony doubts that money was at the bottom of Hall’s crimes. The man wanted his wife’s property. To this end he had to get rid of his wife and of her father. While the latter continued to live, even so cool and daring a scoundrel as Hall could hardly venture on a long, troublesome and delicate operation such as the getting rid of his wife by slow poisoning. While her father lived the wife had still one natural friend and guardian likely to keep a close eye to her interests—a guardian, moreover, with a settled suspicion of and dislike for Hall. It is true that Cain’s health was failing, and that Hall might not have had long to wait. But old men are pf ten like King Charles, “ an unconscionable time over dying*’’ at least those interested in their estate's frequently think so. The invalid, again, might have , altered his will at any moment. Hall was about to be so desperately embarrassed in money matters as to have to live in dread of a bankruptcy, which must have entailed the revelations of his forgeries and penal servitude for the beat part of his remaining life. He had every interest in perpetrating the preliminary crime as a step to the greater murder. But if Cain’s murder were not a preliminary crime, if it stood by itself, it becomes a stupid, almost objectless, quite unaccountable piece of brutality. We are utterly at a loss to conceive by what mental process judges and lawyers have been able so to shelve this all-important matter of the connection between the two murders—a point which of itself was quite enough to have decided any doubts as to the admissibility of evidence of the wife-murder, and of the reasons proved to have caused that crime. Brightly oKwrpngly, tpo, the Court , of Appeal seems ~to. have slurred ovSr the possibility of the jury’s convicting Hall irrespective of evidence of the wife-murder. It is true that Mr Justice Williams had said that he should “ probably ” not have let the jury have any doubts on the matter had the evidence been inadmissible. But the Judge’s mind was then dwelling on the immense importance of the disputed evidence. Undoubtedly there was evidence to go to the jury in any case—if for nothing else, because no other person having access to Cain was even hinted at as a possible poisoner, though the defence had every opportunity of handling all such persons in open Court. Taken all together, this extraordinary case appears to us exactly one of those, grave alike from a legal and moral aspect, upon which the highest Court in the Empire might well be asked to say the final word.