FEARFUL SCENE AT AN EXECUTION.

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 57, 5 July 1884, Page 6

FEARFUL SCENE AT AN EXECUTION.

London, May 2G. — A horrible hanging occurred to-day at Lincoln. The victim was Mrs Leffley, who poisoned her husband last fall and -was duly convicted and sentenced at the Lincolnshire Sessions. She had, how a ever, acquired some money by her husband's death, and she spent it liberally in pressing an appeal to the Home Secretary ior commutation of her sentence to impi'isonment for life, or if that were refused, for a reprieve of a few weeks. To the very last Mrs Leilley thought a reprieve would be granted, and she Mas not by any means reconciled to her fate. When she first saw the hangman in the pinioning-room she shrieked with terror and fainted. She was restored to consciousness 2 , and the hangman began to prepare her for the gallows by pinioning her elbows and fixing a strap loosely about her skirts, to be tightened about her ankles after she had walked to the scaffold. Mrs Leilley fought desper- j ately to prevent these restraints, and gave utterance to frightful yell?, which were heard oven outside the massive walls of the gaol. On the way to the scaffold the screams of the condemned woman were almost maniacal, and drowned the voice of the prison chaplain, who was reciting the prayers for the dying. When she was placed upon the i trap she continued to scream and incoherently declare her innocence until the white cap was pulled down over her mouth and stilled her voice. Then the trap fell, the woman dropped into the well, and in a few minutes was prononnced dead. Contrary to the usual custom, no representatives of the press were admitted to the gaol yard, and very contrary stories are told by the medical men and other officials witnessing the execution. All the facts as stated above are admitted by the witnesses, but some of them state in addition that Hangman Binns was unnecessarily and barbarously brutal in his treatment of the unhappy woman. According to their statement, he knocked her|down in the pinioning room and choked her until her face was livid in order to stop her screaming. The London papers condemn the exclusion of the press, and say this disgraceful scene furnishes another and quite sufficient reason for the dismissal of the drunken brute Binns from his position as official hangman.