A SOLICITOR SENTENCED.

Dunstan Times, Issue 844, 21 June 1878, Page 3

A SOLICITOR SENTENCED.

At tho Manchester Assizes, before Lord Justice Brett, Edward Stanley Bout, solicitor, was charged with feloniously receiving two portmanteaus, containing wearing apparrel, jewellery, and other articles, of the value of LlO, well knowing them to have been stolen.—The portmanteaus, one of which belonged to Mr Parne'l, M. I’., had been stolen at the railway station by a man named Frankell who was convicted. The prisoner defended him, and the stolen property was found at tho solicitor’s office. He admitted that ho had received it for defending the prisoner, but said he did not know ho was doing wrong.—The jury found him guilty. - -Lord Justice Brett, in passing sentence, said : You have been convicted of a gross and disgraceful felony, and you are tho man who has had every means of knowing and judging what would be the result with you of such a crime. You are one of

those men who must be trusted in our profession, who are trusted and deeply trusted in order to assist in tho administration of justice. You have betrayed that trust. You are one of those who bring disgrace on our profession. You are rapacious and grasping, taking everything that you can lay your hands upon from honest people, and, not content with that, taking eveiythiug that you can lay your hands upon from the wretched people whom you have to defend. No one who has had the experience that I have had can fail to know that snch men as you not only assist the bad to plunder the honest, but that you positively strip naked those who are given to you to defend, and you leave them and their families without a chance of retrieving, because you take everything they have. It is not a case of a man who is a receiver of stolon goods for tho purposes of enticing thieves to commit theft, or for the purpose of assisting thieves to do away with tho produce of theft. These receivers arc more dangerous than such a person as you, but they are not more disgraceful, and not so much so, But Ido not consider it right to punish a person who does not assist thieves so severely as I should punish one who does. Yon have committed this disgraceful act in order to satisfy your own rapacity'. If you had not been a member of the profession, and trusted as you have been, 1 should have sentenced you only to imprisonment. But because you arc a member of tho profession and an attorney', 1 feel it my duty to send you to penal servitude. The sentence I pass upon you is that you be kept in penal servitude for five years.