THE TICHBORNE APPLICATION.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2180, 13 March 1880, Page 3

THE TICHBORNE APPLICATION.

Mr Justice Field has granted the Crown 14 days more to complete the drawing up of the roll of the trial of Arthur Orton. The application for a writ of error is based on the contention that the several terms of penal servitude to yvhich. Orton was sentenced ought to have run concurrently, and should not be made to follow one another. A further; point, one purely technical in character, was that the sentence was informal. The statue under which Orton was convicted provides that any person found guilty of perjury may bo_ sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude in addition to any terra of imprisonment, to which such persons is liable at common law. Orton’s case is that the several arraignments of perjury against him relate substantially to the single offence ; that he falsely represented himself on.oath to be Sir Robert Tichborne ; that if he could have been sentenced to separate terms of penal servitude on the counts of the indictment against him, charging him with the same perjury at different timos and places, he might have been similiarly charged on any greater number of accounts, and, if convicted and scentenced on each, he might have been sentenced, 'supposing such sentence to be cumulative,'to an}' number of years of penal servitude. The law having provided .seven years of penal servitude as a maxim penalty for perjury, it could ■never have been contemplated that the term should have been extended at the discretion of a pleader who draws up the indictment and the judge who passes the sentence to an indefinite numbor of years,. far exceeding the probable remainder of the convict’s life. On the other hand, if it is considered that the crime of perjury is one admitting many degrees of heinousness, and that the maximum penalty is frequently! inflicted for offences which are trivial as compared to those of the claimant, yet it would be within the range of tccnical possibility to wrest the law to oppresivc ends by means of a multiplicity of arraignments for perperjury and cumulative sentences For them. This is not an instance in which anything of the kind has been done.