BLATCH OR LILLYWHITE?

New Zealand Times, Volume LXXI, Issue 4259, 19 January 1901, Page 4

BLATCH OR LILLYWHITE?

The iiuostion of the hour in the Magistrate's Court hu; irorn day to flay i>ee>i whether the man iu custody is Blateh, who is accused of the Colehe-.tcr murder, or Lillywhite, who is not. Tins question the Magistrate- lias remitter for decision to Colchester. That, at least, is the practica effect of Mr ifejclden's decision. Jus" befcro it was given, the- opinion was expressed by several .speakers in Court that if the man is really Lillywhite the innocent, nothing worse than a slight and temporary hardship cau come to him through the- transfer- to so distant « point of tho final discovery that he is net Blateh the suposed murderer, -the man himself may, however, find it is impossible to take so optimistic a view. Men charged with murder and kept brooding in confinement in spite of reiterate l '! statements of different identity, are apt to lean rather to the pessimistie way of looking at things. The criminal records teem with cases of mistaken identity, and some of uiem were ulso grievous cases of judicial wrong. Ilio death of Sydney Carton, as imagined by tho brilliant genius of the great novelist, is sublime. But to die for another, not only without wishing it, but' while strenuously protesting, must be the most mrlanenolv and terrible of all the hard fates nint can befall a man. For the innocent to carry the crime of the guilty to the scatfold, and also its odium, and then die tho shameful death prescribed by the law, is awful in the extreme. Yet such things have happened several-times in England. ' There is the story, for example, of tho waiter of York, in Wudi tho conscience of justice was rudely awakened, after the. wrong man had been hanged, by the discovery of the ri"nt man in Dublin. That was in the ciays when moneyless prisoners were undefended by Crown counsel, and the administration of the law was as callous as the law itself was brutal. In the present day all this is changed, and no man who is mistaken fcr another can be deprived of the means and the opportunity ol proving his identity. In tho present in stance the accused man has a remarkable strong case in his favour. In the nrsL place he has documentary evidence which is almost unexplainable except on the supposition that ho is Lilly white. 3n the second, the evidence of those who after many days professed to recognisp him as Blateh was so shaky as to be for from reliable. If the recognition is uo better in" Colchester, the accused nee.l have no further .anxiety." If it is, tnon, he will have no, cause to complain. As it was, the Magistrate cordd-hardly nave taken the responsibility of disbelieving tile last word 'cf the . identifying witnesses, oven though the principal one would not go so far as to profess readiness to bang his suspect en his faltering recollection. Nothing, 'of course,, is more certain than that the transferenceto! an English Court of a particularly in-tej-estmg case, is not attended'by any daiiger of a judicial wrong. The hardship to the accused; if that,is all ho is to) suffer, is the price every member of 'the' community ought to be ready to, pay, in similar, circumstances, for the. security of life and: property guaranteed byj the free laws:of the Empire. Such hadships are reasons, not for "a lax administration, but for substantially reasonable compensation, paid as a rnatteVj of right by tho automatic machinery i,f every Court of tho Empire.