COURT MEMORY TEST

Taranaki Daily News, 16 August 1933, Page 9

COURT MEMORY TEST

SUCCESS OF A JUDGE.

Two police constables, called as witnesses at Bristol Assizes recently, failed to repeat a quotation which an accused man put to them from the dock. Mr. Justice Goddard, however, accomplished the feat unasked. William Joseph Fairman, aged 28, the man concerned, was charged with uttering a seditious speech after a review at Bristol. The constables had stated they wrote down Fairman’s remark'as soon I as he made it. The test Fairman put to them in court was from “Moscow Dialogues,” by Professor J. F. Heckler, and ran: “If we had compromised we would probably be in the same boat as the German Socialists or the MacDonald Labourists, filling the role of lackey to the bourgeoisie and Imperialists. True enough, Lenin’s following shrank - after the disaster of 1905.”

Neither constables repeated the passage accurately, but the judge surprised the court by repeating it himself. In his summing-up, the judge said that the jury had to decide if the police officers’ evidence had been a fair rendering of the substance of Fairman’s speech. “I suppose,” he remarked, “prisoner knows what he said himself—but I am bound to point out to you that he did not go into the box and tell you so. The police account is, therefore, uncontradicted by evidence.” The jury, after a retirement of about half an hour, found Fairman not guilty, and he was discharged.