Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 02.pdf/194

 Legal Acuteness. bond." " We did n't want to read it." "Why? " " Because we've lost it! " " Why, what was the paper you had in your hand?" "Only a blank sheet of foolscap, brother!" The verdict had been taken by consent, and could not be disturbed. A nice piece of legal ingenuity in argu ment occurred at the Cambridge Assizes a few years since. A gentleman was seated in his library one evening, in a lonely coun try-house, when, hearing a noise outside in his garden, he summoned his servant and proceeded after the supposed robbers. In the garden they encountered a man pocket ing potatoes, and called on him to surrender. He refused; a scuffle ensued, and in the struggle the servant was mortally wounded by the thief, who was subsequently arrested and tried for the alleged murder. The facts were undisputed; but the ingenious chain of argument adopted to obtain an acquittal was the following. These potatoes which the prisoner was pocketing were not proved to have been dug up before he took them; and as a spade was near him, and the adjoining earth freshly turned, the presumption was they were in the earth, or attached to the freehold, when the prisoner came upon them. If this were so, they were not the subject of larceny, and the prisoner was not commit ting a felony in taking them, but only a civil trespass. If so, the master and servant had no right to arrest him, and what he did was done in self-defence, and was justifiable homi cide. On this ground he was acquitted; but it certainly appeared remarkable that the question in the case of hanging or acquittal should depend upon the question of a pound or two of potatoes having been dug up or not by a particular person. Had the gar dener dug them up, legally the prisoner would have been executed; as he dug them himself, he was acquitted! We ought, however, to add that the law has been very considerably

altered and amended since the trial of the case referred to. Many of our readers will remember the strange line of defence which Sir Fitzroy Kelly took in the celebrated Tawel murder case, tried at Aylesbury, in which he ap peared for the defence. The victim had been poisoned with prussic acid, and all the facts pointed to the prisoner as having ad ministered it. Sir Fitzroy Kelly, however, elicited from some of the witnesses the fact that the deceased woman was very fond of apples, from others that she had had a pres ent of a bushel of apples, and from the doc tors called that the pips of apples contained this acid. Stringing these three facts to gether, he gravely urged the jury to believe that the woman had eaten so many apples that she had poisoned herself with the prus sic acid of the pips! The jury preferred to find the prisoner guilty, and he was duly hanged, his counsel being honored with the sobriquet of " Apple-pip Kelly " for a long time afterward. The late Mr. Justice Byles had a most shrewd and ingenious manner of adapting stern and unyielding facts to the most clever theory of science. We recollect the convic tion before him at Exeter of a lady who was perpetually stealing trifling articles from the shops she patronized. Being " called upon" for judgment, her counsel argued that she was the victim of kleptomania. " Klepto mania? " asked the judge, in the most inno cent manner; " what is kleptomania? " " A disease, my Lord," said her counsel, " the subject of which is uncontrollably addicted to larceny." " Oh, I see," said the judge; " and a disease, sir, which the judges are sent on circuit, as physicians, to cure. My prescrip tion on the present occasion is twelve months' imprisonment with hard labor!"— The Leisure Hour.