FIGHTS IN CRIMINAL DOCKS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 93, 15 May 1909, Page 3

FIGHTS IN CRIMINAL DOCKS.

| Considering how many desperate crim- : inals are annually sentenced in our I courts of justice, violent scenes of a : kind similar to that enacted by the ' burglar Henry Jackson, at the London I Sessions' the other day, are few and far j between (says a Home paper).. Probably the best remembered of them all, as it certainly was one of the most , dramatic, was when Fowler, the Musj well Hill murderer, turned upon Albeit Milsome, his wretched companion in I crime, while they were both awaiting the jury's verdict in the dock of the Old Bailey, and tried to strangle him. RETAINED A LOADED REVOLVER. A much more serious affair, however, was only averted by the merest accident j some years later, when three men were j sentenced from the sain dock to long I terms of penal servitude for forging j Bank of England notes. One of the coni victs, a Jew named Solomon Barmash, i had managed somehow to retain possession of a loaded revolver during the j whole time he was being tried, and with I this weapon he intended, in the event J of his being found guilty, to shoot dead in open court a certain detective who had given evidence against him. Luckily for himself, however, the officer in question was called away unexpectedly on other business just before the jury filed in with their verdict. Barmash was so chagrined at being cheated out of his cherished revenge that, on being taken below to the cells, he turned his weapon on himself, and blew his own brains out. WOMEN WORSE THAN MEN.

Curiously enough, women arc more liable than men to outbreaks of violent temper on occasions such as these. Thus Annie Galley, who murdered a man named Thorne some years ago. turned upon the wardress who was attending [her in the dock, and who had been most kind to her, and very nearly succeeded in choking her to death. Then, too, there was "the ease of the notorious "Virago of Enniskillen," recorded by Lord Saltoun. She was a female savage, of ungovernable temper, and so immensely powerful that she cohtrived to throw' a warder who had offended her clean over the dock rails into the well of the court. j