Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 06.pdf/566

 Old World Trials. connected with the Church of England, with a rector and a lady superior. In the spring of 1865, the world was sur prised to learn that Miss Constance Kent had voluntarily come forward and confessed herself guilty of her step-brother's murder. At the trial before Mr. Justice Willes, she plead guilty, and Mr., afterward Lord, Cole ridge, made the following statement at her instance after the plea was recorded : " Be fore your Lordship passes sentence, I desire to say two things. First, solemnly, in the presence of Almighty God, as a person who values her own soul, she wishes me to say that the guilt is hers alone, and that her father and others, who have so long suffered most unjust and cruel suspicion, are wholly and absolutely innocent; and secondly, that she was not driven to this act by unkind treat ment at home, as she met with nothing there but tender and forbearing love. And I hope I may add that it gives me a melan choly pleasure to be the organ of these statements for her, because, on my honor, I believe them to be true." The prisoner was then sentenced to death by the learned judge with an emotion which he could not repress; but the capital sentence was after wards commuted to penal servitude. With regard to this case three different theories prevail. The first and least satis factory one is fhat Constance Kent was sim ply a precocious criminal of the ordinary type. The second and probably the correct view is that she belonged either to the denizens

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of the borderland between sanity and in sanity, whose mental equilibrium is at any moment liable to be disturbed, or to the category of moral lunatics, with whose idio syncrasies all students of continental juris prudence are familiar. Her mother had died a lunatic, and Constance herself, though de scribed as a girl of warm and generous dis position, possessed a dull and sluggish intel lect. At the time of the trial, she was an exceedingly plain-looking young woman, with a broad, full, uninteresting face, and large eyes that glanced uneasily around her as if expecting some danger. Dr. Hammond, in his interesting com ments upon this^ase, suggests a third the ory; viz., that Miss Kent, persistently brood ing over the murder, knowing that her father's heart had been broken by the sus picions resting upon him, subjected in St. Mary's College unconsciously to the action of influences calculated to exalt her cerebral sensibility, already abnormally heightened by hereditary predisposition, gradually lost her consciousness of innocence and made an insane and false confession of a crime which she had never committed. Although this ingenious theory cannot, of course, be disproved, the coincidence between the con fession and the circumstances that caused Miss Kent's original arrest; viz., her dislike to the murdered child, and the unaccountable disappearance of the nightdress that she wore the night before the murder, goes a far way towards discrediting it.