FEAR OF GAOL
PRISONER LEAPS OVER BANISTERS
TEMPORARY INSANITY Reed. 10.36 a.m. LONDON, Wednesday. A jury returned a verdict that James Spiers, aged 37, who was sentenced on Friday to 10 years’ penal servitude and 15 strokes of the cat, for a brutal attempt to rob a city cashier, and who leaped over the banisters and fell headlong 25 feet to the stone floor of Wandsworth Prison, because he feared the birch, committed suicide while temporarily insane. This was brought on by the thought of a long term of imprisonment, and was no fault of the prison officials. Spiers’s widow, in evidence, said she saw Spiers at the Central Criminal Court after the sentence. He said: “Never mind; I cannot possibly get that time.” She asked: “What about the flogging?” He replied: “I don’t mind that; it is the 10 years to which I object.”
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/SUNAK19300206.2.85
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Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 890, 6 February 1930, Page 9
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145FEAR OF GAOL Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 890, 6 February 1930, Page 9
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