JUDGE AND JURY MISTAKES

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6600, 16 May 1925, Page 1

JUDGE AND JURY MISTAKES

In a most interesting article under the title “Judges Do Sometimes Go Wrong,” Mr Ernest Bowen-Rowlands, barrister-at-law, and son of Judge Bower-Rowlands, recalls some remarkable stories in Pearson’s Magazine. “The first miscarriage of justice in my own experience was a trial at the Pembrokesljjre Assizes in which I appeared for the defence of a girl on a charge of attempting to murder a whole family,” he writes. “This girl was'maid to a veterinary surgeon and for some reason, or no reason, she poured a quart of aromatic vinegar into the soup, flavoured a rice pudding with enough strychnine to kill 50 people and powdered the beef with a strong preparation of arsenic. The surgeon, his wife, and three children, who dined on these things, became seriously ill, and two of the children only escaped death by a small margin. However, all recovered. Our defence was that the surgeon was negligent in keeping the drugs in a get-at-able place and that the girl innocently used them to improve the flavour of the soup and eatables. It was absurd, but successful. The judge happened to be in an irritable mood, and he attacked the surgeon for coming into Court late, and so upset him that he went to pieces in the witness box. The jury acquitted the girl, who went home, cut her grandmother’s throat with a pair of scissors, and eventually found her way to her rightful place, the lunatic asylum. Here the proper verdict would have been guilty but insane, and if the jury had decidely rightly a peculiarly cruel murder would not subsequently have been committed.”