SUPREME COURT.

Evening Star, Volume VIII, Issue 2396, 6 December 1870, Page 2

SUPREME COURT.

CRIMINAL SESSIONS. Tins Day. (Before Mr Justice Chapman.) BESTIALITY. James Hutchings, a lad about 19 years of age, was charged with this offence. Mr Barton defended. The commission of the offence was sworn to by detective Farrell. For the defence, the prisoners mother and sister, and a Mr Chilcott were called to prove an alibi. Their evidence went to prove that at the hour named by the officer the prisoner could not have been on the spot where it was alleged the offence was committed. The jury, after being absent for about an hour, returned a verdict of guilty. Remanded for sentence. SIIEEI’ STEALING. Thomas Hewson, Richard Fellows, Jas. Neill, and James Anderson, on being arrainged on an indictment charging them with this offence, pleaded not guilty. On the application of Mr Barton, who defended them, the trial was postponed until Thursday, to enable them to produce a material witness. THE DRYBKEAD MYSTERY. Keziali Boulton was indicted for having, at Dry bread, on the 18th October last, unlawfully broken in a grave, and removed therefrom the body of a male child, name unknown. Mr Barton defended the prisoner. The case, as stated by the Crown Prosecutor, was as follows :—The offence with which the prisoner was charged was of a not usual kind ; in fact it was the only one that had happened here. It was an offence at common law—a misdemeanour—to remove, without lawful authority, a body from a that grave he in a churchyaiWor he in a piece of ground belonging to a dissenting body. It mattered not whether the motives of the persons committing the act were lawful ones or improper ones. It was impossible to conceive what

was the motive of the prisoner unless it was —and there appeared on the depositions something to support the supposition—a desire to make her husband and friends believe that she had borne a child. That appeared to be the only assignable motive for her act. But she went about in a most extraordinary way to establish that fact. She appeared to have got a dead child of a Mrs King which, when three weeks old had been accidentally suffocated, and niton this child a post mortem examination had been made —the effect of that examination being to furnish conclusive evidence as to its identity. The child was buried, and about six weeks afterwards the prisoner conceived the idea of digging up the body of the child, and passing it off as one which she herself had borne. The extraordinary thing in the first instance was that such an idea should have ever entered her head, next that she could ever have imagined that she could pass a child three weeks old as one recently born — or that she induced her husband and the medical men who saw her to believe that she had been in the family way, or to deceive her female neighbors that she bad been suffering from the effects of a recent delivery. Kot only did she do that while the child was there, but she prepared the minds of her friends for the event of the birth of a child, but stating to them some two or three weeks before that she was in the family way, in order that when her confinement did take place they might not be surprised. Those were the short facts of the case. There was no direct evideneethattheprisoncr disinterred the body, but the evidence was conducive as to its being found in her possession. The presumption the jury wei - e asked to draw', and were bound to draw from it, was that she herself had disinterred the body. The jury returned a verdict of guilty, and the prisoner was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment.