CHAPTER SEVEN

A Petition for Release

DENIED BY THE SECRETARY OF STATE

I had been at Aylesbury about eight months when I petitioned the Secretary of State for a reconsideration of my case, with a view to my release. To this I received the usual official reply, “Not sufficient grounds.”

A prisoner may petition the Secretary of State every three months. In my opinion, the privilege of petitioning on a case should be reduced from four times a year to once a year, with the provision that if anything of importance to a prisoner transpires within that period it may be duly submitted to the Secretary of State on recommendation of the governor or director; that all complaints regarding food, treatment, or medical attention should be referred to the visiting director in the first instance, instead of the Secretary of State, who under the present system passes it back to the directors for the necessary investigation. This would do away with the continual daily distress and irritation and disappointment created in the prison on receipt of unfavorable replies from the Home Office. A prisoner petitions. A private inquiry is held, to which the prisoner is not a party, and of which she has no information, nor does she receive any during its progress or after its conclusion, save that the result, which is nearly always negative, is communicated to her. In this inquiry any one who is opposed to the prisoner may seek to influence the official mind. I will state a case in point. A friend asked the Secretary of State for the United States, the Hon. John Hay, to interest himself in my case. Mr. Hay replied that he had been informed by the Home Office that I had been “a disobedient and troublesome prisoner.”

REPORT OF MY MISCONDUCT REFUTED

When I was told this at a visit I had my name entered to see the governor. I insisted that the governor should inform me when, and after what breach of the rules, such a report had been sent to the Home Office. After carefully looking through my penal record he could find no entry to that effect, and concluded by saying that I must have been misinformed. He said that my conduct was good, and that he had never made any report to the contrary. Obviously, therefore, this report from the Home Office to Mr. Hay was due to an adverse influence, of which I have still no knowledge. Statements are made against a prisoner, of the nature of which she is entirely ignorant. Being ignorant, she has no way of refuting them. Worse still, they are retained in the Home Office to her dying day, and the unfortunate woman knows nothing of them or their effect. The only thing certain is that she is further condemned.

NEED OF A COURT OF CRIMINAL APPEAL

The Home Office, while exercising a private function of reconsideration grounded on the royal prerogative of mercy, emphatically disclaims being a court of appeal or a judicial tribunal in any sense of the word. Yet the consideration of a convict’s case rests alone with the Secretary of State. It is a matter of unwritten law that the Home Secretary shall act individually and solely upon his own responsibility, and none of his colleagues are to assume or take part therein.

There are numerous instances where judges, witnesses, and juries have gone wrong. Indeed, it will be found that even in cases which have seemed the clearest and least complicated in the trial grievous mistakes have been made. But in England the blame rests on the public and the bar in that no means are provided to set the wrong right. What a difference it would have made in my life if I had been granted a second trial! I could have called other witnesses, submitted fresh evidence, and refuted false testimony. Is it not the climax of injustice that men and women, if sued for money, even for a few shillings, can appeal from court to court--even to the House of Lords, the English court of last resort; but when character, all that life holds dear, and life itself, are in jeopardy, a prisoner’s fate may depend upon the incompetent construction of one man, and there is no appeal?

A hard-worked Secretary of State, whose time, night and day, is crowded with every kind of duty, correspondence, and labor, in the House of Commons or in the Home Office, has to consider a vast number of petitions, complaints, and miscarriages of justice, or too severe sentences, any one of which might require hours and sometimes days to investigate. He is assisted by several officers, but, strange to say, it is no part of their qualifications (or that of the Home Secretary himself), that they should be familiar with the criminal law or the prosecution or defense of prisoners. These permanent officials are, besides, occupied with hundreds of other matters which come before the Home Office, on which they have to guide their chief. Think of the untold sufferings of individuals and families, the shame and degradation which they would be spared, if England had a court of criminal appeal.

HISTORIC EXAMPLES OF BRITISH INJUSTICE

The Home Office detects and corrects a larger number of erroneous verdicts than the public is aware. This arises from the secret and partial methods of remedying miscarriages of justice frequently adopted. The first object is to maintain the public belief in the infallibility of judges and juries. If an innocent person could slip out quietly, without shaking this belief, he might be permitted to do so. The Home Secretary is, in fact, a politician, who has little time to spare for the consideration of criminal cases, and furthermore must see to it that his conduct does not injure his party. Thus he is often deterred from interfering with verdicts and sentences by sheer timidity. When he affirms a sentence he can throw the greater part of the blame on others if he is afterward proved to be wrong; but when he reverses either verdict or sentence, he must take the whole responsibility upon himself. This is, I believe, the true explanation of the secret and partial reversals which are not unusual at the Home Office. The Home Secretary, as well as his subordinates, must frequently let “dare not wait upon I would.”

If a crime is committed and no one is brought to justice, the police are blamed; but if a person is convicted the police are praised, without regard as to whether the right person has been convicted. Hence there is usually a strong effort to beat up evidence against the person suspected, as in my case and that of Adolf Beck (see page 155), and to keep back anything in favor of the prisoner that comes to the knowledge of the police. When an appeal is made from the verdict to the Home Secretary, the first step is to consult the very judge who is responsible, in nine cases out of ten, for the erroneous verdict. It is easy to see that, where such reference is made, the judge is liable to be biased in support of his own rulings. How much more the ends of justice would be furthered by having the case retried!

God only knows how many men and women have been innocent of the charges brought against them, and for which they have been unjustly punished. I will mention a few only of many cases on record.

A man, Hebron by name, was convicted at Manchester, of murder. He was sentenced to death, but fortunately this was commuted to penal servitude for life. After serving two years the real murderer, a man named Peace, was discovered, and Hebron was “graciously pardoned.”

Another cruel case was that of John Kensall, who was convicted of murder, but, through action taken by the late Lord Chief Justice Russell, was shown to be innocent. The Home Office could not at first “see its way to interfere,” and had it not been for Lord Russell’s clear head and splendid generalship, by which the authorities at the Home Office were outwitted, he would not have been released so soon.

The case of the man Hay, wrongly convicted, was of a serious nature, showing that he was the victim of a conspiracy; yet had it not been for Sir William Harcourt’s instituting an investigation independent of the Home Office, it is very doubtful whether Hay would have been able to establish his innocence. But he did so, and a pardon was granted him.

It looks almost as if justice in England were growing of late more than ordinarily blind. Thrice, within three years, has the Home Secretary’s “pardon” been granted to men found to have been wrongfully convicted.

The average man takes it for granted that these hideous mistakes must, of necessity, be few and far between; but the criminologist knows better. He, at all events, is well aware that every year a number of innocent people are sentenced to suffer either an ignominious death upon the scaffold, or the long-drawn-out living death of penal servitude.

Many of these judicial miscarriages never come to light at all. Others are purposely glossed over by the powers that be. But occasionally one occurs of so appalling a nature that it rivets the attention and shocks the conscience of the entire civilized world, as in the case of Adolf Beck.

THE CASE OF ADOLF BECK

Adolf Beck was twice convicted for crimes committed by a man who somewhat resembled him. He served his first sentence and had been convicted for a second crime on “misrepresented identity” when his innocence was providentially established. The case is too lengthy for detailed account in these pages, and I shall content myself in giving the summing-up of Mr. George R. Sims in the pamphlet reprinted from his presentation of the case in the columns of _The Daily Mail_ of London:

“I have told in plain words the story of a foul wrong done to an innocent man.

“I have proved beyond all question that Adolf Beck was in 1896, by the Common Sergeant, Sir Forrest Fulton, at the Old Bailey, sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude for being an ex-convict named John Smith.

“I have proved that he was _not_ found guilty of being John Smith by the jury.

“The former conviction for which Mr. Adolf Beck was sentenced and punished was not only never submitted to the jury, but they were warned by the judge that they were not to take the issue of Beck being Smith into consideration in arriving at their verdict. They were to dismiss it completely from their minds.

“I have proved that if this issue had been left for the jury to consider they must have acquitted Mr. Beck, who showed by an indisputable alibi that he could not be Smith, the man convicted in 1877.

“I have proved that this terrible mockery of justice, the conviction of an innocent man for a series of crimes that it was quite impossible he could have committed, was brought about by the action of the leading counsel for the Treasury, which action was supported by the Common Sergeant, Sir Forrest Fulton.

“I have proved that the evidence of the policeman, Eliss Spurrell, which was used at the police-court to assist in getting Beck committed for trial, was kept out at the Old Bailey, where it would have insured Beck’s acquittal.

“I have proved that at the police-court in 1896 Mr. Gurrin, the Treasury expert, reported that all the documents connected with the 1896 frauds were in the handwriting of John Smith of 1877.

“I have proved that at the 1896 trial at the Old Bailey Mr. Gurrin swore that, to the best of his belief, all the documents were in the disguised handwriting of Mr. Beck.

“I have proved that no one in his senses could at the trial have accepted the theory that Adolf Beck was John Smith after listening to the evidence of Major Lindholm, Gentleman of the Chamber to the King of Denmark, Col. Josiah Harris, and the Consul-General for Peru at Liverpool.

“The Common Sergeant accepted as true their evidence of a complete alibi for Mr. Beck, so far as 1877 and the years Smith was in prison were concerned, or he would, it is to be presumed, have taken measures to have those gentlemen prosecuted for committing wilful and corrupt perjury in order to defeat the ends of justice.

“I have proved that Beck, after his imprisonment, compelled the Home Office authorities to acknowledge that he was not Smith, and to admit the physical impossibility of his being Smith--Smith was a Jew, and he, Beck, was not--and that therefore, by the evidence of the Treasury witnesses, he had been wrongfully committed.

“I have proved that Beck was stripped and officially examined for body marks before his trial, in order that such marks might be compared with those on the record in the possession of the authorities as the body marks of John Smith.

“I have proved that Adolf Beck had none of the body marks of John Smith, the man in whose handwriting Mr. Gurrin had declared the incriminating documents of 1896 to be.

“I have proved that all the petitions setting forth these facts and others, which fully established Beck’s innocence, met with no consideration.

“I have proved that when the frauds of 1877 and 1896 were repeated in 1904, and the incriminating documents were found to be in the handwriting of 1877, stroke for stroke, peculiarity for peculiarity, almost word for word, the fact that the authorities had admitted that Mr. Beck _could not be_ the author of the 1877 frauds or the writer of the 1877 documents was utterly ignored, and the responsible authorities, with every proof of Mr. Beck’s innocence in their possession, allowed him to be arrested, charged, tried, and convicted again.

“I have proved that the identification of Mr. Beck by the female witnesses as the man who robbed them was a monstrous farce.

“I have proved that, so far from Mr. Beck being the ‘double’ of John Smith, he was utterly unlike him, except that each had a gray mustache. Beck had neither the noticeable scar at the point of the jaw nor the noticeable wart over one eye that are striking marks of identity in John Smith--marks which would not escape the most casual observer.

“I have proved that Beck’s conviction in 1896 was secured by a device which was utterly unworthy of a British court of justice--a device so unfair and unjust that an innocent and inoffensive foreigner, a Norwegian who had sought the hospitality of our shores, was by its employment sent into penal servitude for seven years for the crimes of another man.

“I have proved that Mr. Beck was in 1904 convicted of repeating letter for letter, word for word, trick for trick, check for check, false address for false address, false name for false name, the frauds of 1877 and 1896, of which the authorities had absolute proof that he was innocent, and of which, though they had never remitted one day of his sentence, they had _admitted_ that he was innocent.

“I have been careful to keep to the main issue, and have refrained from examining the side issues, some of which reveal most lamentable features in connection with our criminal procedure.

“I will prove one thing more, and leave the facts I have established to the judgment of the public.

“At the end of the report of the second trial of Adolf Beck, which took place at the Old Bailey on June 27, 1904 (Sessions Paper CXL.,