A CAREER OF CRIME.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume 3, Issue 247, 29 November 1878, Page 3

A CAREER OF CRIME.

+ At the Liverpool Borough Sessions, in August last, Ann Smith, sixty-five years of age, pleaded guilty to stealing .a roll of cloth from the shop door of a local tradesman. She deliberately lifted aip the roll and ran away with it, and, saying that she had a black character, she now appealed to the Recorder for mercy. Mr AspinaJl, Q.C., said the woman's career had been a most extraordinary one. In 1839 she was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for stealing. In 1844 she got nine months, in 1848 four months, and in the same j-ear later on twelve months. In 1851, early in the year, a month, and then in July she was sentenced to seven years' penal servitude. In 1855, once more for ■stealing, she was arrested and sent back to penal servitude. In 1859 she was again before the magistrate, and her term of penal servitude being unexpired she was sent back to complete it. In 1862 that sentence was over, but almost immediately she was again convicted, and got ten years. She seemed to have got out of that in about seven years, which waa about the time she would be kept. In 1869 she was sentenced again to seven years' penal servitude, and now she was convicted once more. Probably she always would be before the Court, for a3 soon as she got out of gaol she began committing- an offence precisely of the same description as before. In order to reflect as to what was best to be done with a woman so incorrigible, the Recorder delayed passing sentence until the next day, when he sentenced her to seven years' penal servitude.