A Strange Request.

Thames Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 18972, 1 December 1933, Page 4

A Strange Request.

MAN’S LIFE AT STAKE. FRIENDS GO TO PICTURES. Just how much does a murder mean to the men of the north of Australia? This was the question aroused recently at the Supremo Court at Darwin by one of the strangest requests ever put to a Judge trying a man for his life. When Judge Wells decided to sit late to avoid locking up the jury, seven witnesses from an outback station, who see civilisation perhaps once in every three years, asked if they could be excused, as they wanted to go to the pictures. Judge Wells lifted his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders and agreed. While the witnesses were away he sentenced to death a man who had been their comrade for many years. The case was one in which Ernest Moray Baker, part-owner of Binmarch station on the Barkly tableland, was found guilty of murder. The jury added a strong recommendation to mercy on the grounds that Baker’s ill-health, business worries and disappointment in a love affair all tended to unbalance his mind. Baker is the first white man sentenced to death' in the North for 40 years.