COURT OF MEMORIES

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVII, 6 December 1927, Page 6

COURT OF MEMORIES

OLD LONDON LANDMARK. JUDGE’S HARSH SENTENCE. The old Middlesex Sessions House in Clerkenwell Green, which may be demolished as a result of the site being offered for sale, has a grimmer history than any other court in England (says a London paper). For more than a century people were sent -from it to long terms of penal servitude, and its reputation for savage sentences was such that criminals much preferred tho Old Bailey. There were 185 sentences of penal servitude, none of them for less than five years, and 110 of them for seven years, tho total being 1362 years, in the calendar for 1877. 50 years ago. Wluit story the walls'of this stately building, adorned with the effigies of Mercy und Justice, would tell if they could speak! A woman of seventy-eight was sentenced to seven years for stealing a loin of mutton, and a youth of 19 received a similar sentence, to be followed by seven years police supervision. tor petty larceny. Sir Peter Ediin, who wits a juage at Middlesex Sessions House for 22 years—the permanent chairman was called a judge —and who was said to have regarded an acquittal as a personal insult once sentenced a man for a misdemeanour, to three consecutive terms of two years’ imprisonment with hard .abour. Another judge Sir William Hardman, sentenced a man for theft of various pairs of boots to terms which aggregated 20 years’ penal servitude. The man, surviving his imprisonment immediately stole another pair ol boots and appeared again, but,Judge Hardman had just died. Fortunately there arc lighter aspects in the history of Middlesex Sessions House. For instance, Sir Peter Ediin bad a sly trick of making juries hurry up with their verdiet. Up to the ’nineties a jury had to be kept intact, in all felonies as well as in murder trials, until the case was over, and as Sir Peter did not like sitting after 11 p.m. ho came to a little understanding with an usher. At the beginning of every day he would ostentatiously tell the usher to go to tho Cannon Street Hotel and fix up accommodation for tho jury for the night.

The usher would simply go to a nearby public house, and come back presently and say ho had made full arrangements for the jury to be locked up in a room all night at the hotel. The ruse was generally successful, a jury agreeing upon a verdict readily rather than be locked up for the night.