TERRIBLE DISCLOSURE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 3817, 12 July 1928, Page 3

TERRIBLE DISCLOSURE.

INNOCENT MAN EXECUTED.

A MURDER IN GERMANY.

Germany has been horrified by the disclosure of an amazing miscarriage of justice —the execution of an innocent man for a murder which others have now confessed. The victim of this appalling legal tragedy was a Russian farm labourer named Jakodowski, who was executed in 1925 on a charge of first hanging and then drowning his four-year-old illegitimate son. The disclosure of the blunder is made by the Mecklenburg-Strelitz Ministry of Justice, which makes the terrible confession: —‘‘We have no doubt that this unfortunate man was condemned to death and executed for a murder of which he was completely innocent,” Jakodowski was a prisoner of war when he went to Germany in 1916. After peace was signed he remained at the farm to which he had been sent to work. At the trial the hapless man, who could speak very little German, was Refused the services of an interpreter. It was suggested by the prosecution that he killed the chilld to rid himself of what was to him simply an encumbrance.

Jakodowski had always shown great kindness to the child, but was the last person seen talking to him on the afternoon of the murder. Up to the last he stoutly protested his iuoeouce of the crime, but his plea was ignored, although the purely circumstantial evidence against him was decidedly ineom-i plete and weak. The blunder has recently come to light as the result of the untiring efforts 'of oppionenks of capital punishment, who did not cease to investigate the accusations which the condemned man made against three of the four chief witnesses at the trial.

These men have been arrested, and their alleged confessions have revealed the terrible truth. According to the statement of one of the men, the true motive of the crime was the desire of the murderer to occupy the wretched attic in which the child slept. No fewer than fifteen people were living in two rooms of the miserable cottage which was the child’s home. The murderer is alleged to have been committed by the child's two uncles, brothers of its dead mother.