THE GLOBE. MONDAY, AUGUST 15, 1881. AN ODD CASE.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2298, 15 August 1881, Page 2

THE GLOBE. MONDAY, AUGUST 15, 1881. AN ODD CASE.

Under the above heading, in our issue

of Friday last, we published a report of some proceedings in the Resident Magistrate's Court on that day, 'which seem peculiar enongh to call for further notice. A young woman was brought before the Bench on a double charge. Of vagrancy —that i 3 to say, of having no lawful visible means of support—and of having

obtained money from a clergyman on a false pretence, both being offences punish-

able under the provisions of the Vagrant Act, which, with very wide powers, seeks

to grapple with what may be termed incipient crime; to clear the streets of

known rogues and vagabonds whose presence while at liberty is a standing menace to the peace and safety of any community. The last named charge against this woman was proved to have been utterly unfounded ; the clergyman who, it was supposed, had been imposed upon by some one, when confronted with the accused, simply said he had never seen her before. As to the other charge—that of general vagabondism—any unbiassed reader of the report, which is a very good one as far as it goes, must come to the conclusion that there had been nothing in the conduct of the accused to bring her under the operation of the Act. It is the manner of getting up the case by the police, the character of the evidence bronght, with the »nfair use of it against her, and her treatment by the Bench afterwards, to which we desire to draw the attention of our readers. Two residents of Bicearton, at whose instigation probably the arrest had been made, came forward, and in a general. way stated that the prisoner was in the habit of frequenting a gravel pit near to their residences, from which she sallied out to accost passers-by—swaggers—-whom she occasionally took with her into the place she haunted. The drift of their untouched testimony was, in brief, that she lived in this pit and made a brothel of it, and a hunting ground of itsvicinity. The impression left was that, night and day—we insist upon this—at all hours, she pursued an infamous calling with many associates, and was a nuisance and an injury to the whole neighborhood in general and to the witnesses in particular. They also said they had heard—they believed—that she solicited alms. That was what they had "to say; those were the statements which, of course, thepolice accepted as nothing but the truth, and which must have induced them to-

take the steps they did. There was another witness, a policeman, whose evideßce shall be dealt with presently. The acensed, however, had a word or two to say to these witnesses. Not content with maudlin protestation, as is the custom of the class with which it was attempted to identify her, she indignantly denied most of the incidents mentioned, and, by pertinent cross-examination, showed that the inferences made were overstrained or totally unwarranted. The witnesses were compelled to admit that she had never been on their own premises at all; that she had never been seen in the pit with men; that she had never been seen there at night time; and, finally, under her questions, the swaggers, like the " hundred cats in the barn, J mother," melted away into one or into I two whom only she had been seen to accost on the Queen's Highway. She said, of course, very energetically, that she was not leading, and never had led, an immoral life; which, indeed, was superfluous on her part. She was not there to prove a negative ; it was the part of the police to prove her a bad woman, which, surely, they did not. And here the case should have ended. The whole of the evidence offered on the specific charges for which she was brought up had been got out, and upon that she should have been dealt with as guilty or not guilty. But this was by no means the termination. A police officer was put up to say what he knew of the prisoner's antecedents. And a very bad account he gave of her. With more regard to decency and fair play than was exhibited

in its production by the police or its acceptance by the Bench, we decline to reproduce it here; because it was utterly wrong to admit it, and because it was unsubstantiated. It was sworn to and—denied. So were the former statements, and they were proved to be incorrect. Who was to say that all the statements were not misleading ? Not the police after their first failure, and certainly not the Magistrates, who were bound to protect the prisoner from the effect of any but the best of evidence—evidence which belonged to the case, and not to somo other matters which took place in some other district six months or six weeks before. Constable Henry, if his predecessors in the box had made out their case, might with propriety have been listened to, if the Magistrates had made up their minds that the accused was guilty, in order to guide them as to the amount of punishment to be inflicted. As it was his presence in the witness box was a mere exhibition of inexperience or ignorance of the rules to bo observed in conducting a prosecution, and a cruel insult to a defenceless woman. At the conclusion, the Magistrates did not apologise to the woman for the suffering and degradation which had been inflicted upon her. His Worship told her that if sho was found " knocking

about" between that and a given time she would be arrested. Knocking about! What is knocking about ? If a phase of it consists in choosing a cool seat in a stone quarry, the police, so long as the owner of that quarry does not complain, will probably, after mature consideration, find it to the benefit of their own reputation, in future, to let such shocking offenders severely alone. We are not of those who join in foolish aspersions that are often cast npon the police, and we have shown ourselves not backward in defending the gentlemen who occupy the Bench from unjust attacks. But we are compelled, in this case, to express our opinion that the first were led by a cock-and-bull story into something very like persecution, and that the latter, when it came before them, failed to deal with it in that spirit of just discrimination which should be exhibited by the occupiors of the office they fill.