AN INCONVENIENT IDENTIFICATION.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLVIII, Issue 4, 24 July 1912, Page 61

AN INCONVENIENT IDENTIFICATION.

Some startling instances of blunders in identification have come to light in connection with may police court and session cases, but surely few parallels can be found on record of the amazing happenings at the South-west London police court at Battersea the other day. A Airs Stoneman, a highly respectable woman, attended the court to make an application to the magistrate. To her surprise and consternation she was hustled into the dock, and found herself being tried upon a charge of having been drunk and disorderly on the preceding Saturday evening. In vain she protested her innocence, and a police constable swore positively that she was- the woman he had arrested and who had been released on bail under the name of Jessie Boswell. Mrs Stoneman was thereupon fined five shillings, and, not happening to have the money on her, was taken, protesting, to the cells.

Later in the day the real Jessie Boswell tearfully and penitently surrendered to her bail, and the police constable was bound to admit that he had made a blunder. And it was a very bad one, for the two women bore no resemblance to each other.

No man with any proper regard to the oath he had taken or to the demands of his position as a police officer could have made such a mistake. A more glaring case of the grossest kind of carelessness on the part of a servant of the State remains to be recorded. Of course, Mrs Stoneman was released with a handsome apology, you will naturally imagine. Not a bit of it. She was released, but the apology took the form of a mild expression of regret that she should have been “inconvenienced.” There was a somewhat similar case recently at Lambeth Police Court, but in that case the blundering police could at any rate plead that the victim and the Simon Pure might have passed for one another “in the shade with the light behind ’em.” In the Battersea affair the only points of resemblance between the victim and Jessie Boswell were the possession of hair, nose, eyes and mouth, the usual complement of limbs, and the wearing of feminine garments. Beyond these things no man in his sober senses could have honestly mistaken Mrs Stoneman for the peccant Jessie Boswell, and one wonders what will happen to the blundering P.C. who, though his name was Wright, happened to be so inexcusably wrong.