JEALOUS LOVE TRAGEDY

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 962, 3 May 1930, Page 30

JEALOUS LOVE TRAGEDY

MURDERER’S APPEAL FAILS AN INSANE SUSPICION James Achcw, an American, has failed in his appeal against the sentence of death passed upon him, at the Old Bailey, for the murder of Sybil Sarah de Costa, aged 35, with whom he had been living. The crime took place in a boardinghouse at Bayswater, and it was urged in the Court of Criminal Appeal that he was insane when he cut the unfortunate woman’s throat. Mr. James, for the appellant, said that, in view of the frequent decisious of the court that the question of insanity was for the jury, he did not think that he ought to call further evidence, but on the evidence given at the trial, and notably that of Dr. Watson, one of the most experienced medical officers in the prison service, he asked the court to say that the only possible verdict which the jurj' could properly have returned was one of guilty, but insane. He asked the court to exercise its powers by substituting that verdict for the verdict of guilty. THE JUDGMENT Mr. Justice Talbot, in giving the judgment of the court, said that the appellant was convicted of the murder of a woman with whom he had been living for some time, but who was not his wife. When the police came to the house they found the woman with her throat cut and the man with a wound—doubtless self-inflicted—in his throat. His head was in the gas oven, and the gas was turned on. The only question at the trial was whether at the time when the act was committed the man was or was not insane in the sense in which that word was used in law. A good deal of evidence on that question was called at the trial. There was evidence of three people who spoke of the general demeanour of the prisoner as it appeared to the ordinary observer; and that of three medical witnesses, two for the Crown and one for the defence. No doubt on that evidence the jury might have found the man was insane, but the question for the Court of Criminal Appeal was whether the jury was bound to find that verdict. After reviewing the medical evidence given at the trial, his Lordship said that there was the sharpest difference between what medical men, and perhaps ordinary men, called insanity and the legal definition of insanity such as to justify a verdict of guilty, but insane. On the legal definition there was a definite ruling, which bound both the judge at the trial and that court. His Lordship having read the fourth answer of the judges in McNaughten’s case [the famous leading case on murder in insanity], said that the application of that rule to the present case was quite clear. The prisoner had an insane delusion that the murdered woman was unfaithful to him, and so persistently unfaithful that, if she had really done the things which he suspected, she would have been a most abandoned woman. There was in fact. no ground even for rational suspicion. But, assuming that the dead woman had done all that the appellant insanely believed her to have done, it needed no statement that that did not justify a husband, or any other man, in putting an end to her life. It appeared to the court clear beyond all question that the appeal must be refused. That judgment, of course, could in no way affect any action which the Home Secretary, applying different considerations, might think fit to take.