JURIES AND THEIR VERDICTS.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 2988, 22 January 1881, Page 4

JURIES AND THEIR VERDICTS.

Among the curious verdicts recently delivered and odd scenes chronicled as occurring in the jury-box, the foremost place must be given to the deliverances of a jury at Washoe, that a man accused of stealing milk from a neighbor's cow at night was " guilty of milking a cow in the first degree. " In a military divorce suit in England (Wigston v. "Wigston and Jekyl), the jury returned the following extraordinary verdict:—" We give the wife the benefit of the doubt, but, at the same time, we severely censure tho conduct of the co-respondent. " Lieutenant Jekyl's counsel immediately protested against any censure upon his client forming part of the proceedings ; but the verdict was not so idiotic as that in the case of Shillito v. Shiliito and Hirst, where Mrs Shillito was acquitted on the ground of insufficient evidence, and Mr Firth found guilty of having Committed adultery with her. Afc Brighton, England, in a criminal case, the foreman, who was a foreigner, said " Not Guilty " when he meant to say " Guilty, but recommended to mercy. " In the meantime the prisoner had been discharged and some of the jury had left the box. Before they had all gone the blunder was discovered, the prisoner re-arrested, and very much to his surprise, sentenced to a month's imprisonment. The question was put by prisoner's counsel whether, after the discharge of the prisoner, and the separation (so far as their partial dispersal was a separation) of the jury, the prisoner could be legally detained. A question very similar in its details came up in England some years ago, where a verdict of "Not guilty," announced erroneously by one of the jurors, was entered on his minutes by the Clerk of the Peace, and taken down in his note-book by the Chairman of Quarter Sessions who heard the case. Ihe prisoner was discharged, but the jury had not separated before the mistake was discovered and corrected. Such blunders, however, would bo avoided were the old practice observed of the clerk asking " Gentlemen of the jury, hoarken to your verdict while the Court records it. You say the prisoner is not guilty, and that i 3 the verdict of you all." At Elmira, in June, one Freedom Page, Schuyler County, put on trial for horsestealing, when the jurors, after remaining out all night, failed to agree and ivere discharged, got up and, to the surprise of everybody, said he did steal the horse, in spite of the conscientious doubts of the jury, and was then and there sentenced to a year's imprisonment. At Lisbon, Portugal, lately, the > ount of Penramcor, a high Court official, was accused of circulating forged bank notes. The jury acquitted him without leaving the box, and the judge promptly rejected the verdict and sent the accused back to prison to await a new trial. At Northampton, Mass., in February, came up a dog case, where a little girl had been bitten. While the District Attorney was combating the assertion that it was impossible for so peaceful an animal to injure tho plaintiff, and demonstrating tbat any animal might bite a person, suddenly the foreman of the jury asked the privilege of making a remark, and said that the Bible only warned us to " beware of dogs," and not of other animals. The jury, one is not surprised to hear, gave tho plaintiff double the amount of damages according to law, and one is not surprised to learn that twenty of tho twenty-ono other cases to come before the same panel wexe settled by the

Coroner Hcrrman, in April last, when Thomas Barker was killed while in company with two persons, one of whom was shown to have pushed him down the steps, got a Haarlem jury which decided that tho prisoner " came to his death from an accidental fall, or a push or a blow en using a fall, at the hands of some party to us unknown," a verdict which moved the coroner bo deliver the following pithy allocution .—" I think you are a very stupid set of jurymen. I discharge you without my thanks, gentlemen of the jury, but I hold the prisoner. Captain Bobbins, don't you ever bring me a jury from Haarlem again, or I'll challenge every one that comes before me." In Cheshire, England, last spring, a woman who hsicl repeatedly quarrelled with her husband, was murdered one night. The body was bruised, and around the neck was a red mark as of a cord. A cord with clean clothes on it was in the front kitchen, and a similar piece with a noose in it was found in the house where the husband had slept the night of the murder. The piece had marks of fresh blood on it, and two hairs similar to some taken from the head of the deceased for the purpose of identification. JThese proofs, with the very suspicious conduct of the man on tho morning after the murder, were sufficient to convict him. The coroner's jury were so interested in the case that, on retiring to consider their verdict, they cut off several pieces of the cord as souvenirs of the occurrence; the consequence of which was that it became impossible to establish the identify of the cord in the front kitchen with the fragments which had the marks of murder on it.