Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 18.pdf/22

 CHRISTOPHER ROBINSON, K.C. self to the western circuit. Before many years had passed hardly an action was entered for trial at the assizes in that district without Robinson being retained either on one side or on the other. When the time came that he could pick and choose he gradually refused briefs at trials in out side places and devoted himself to work before the Court of Appeal and the other courts sitting in Osgoode Hall, Toronto (the Westminster Hall of Ontario), the Supreme Court of the Dominion at Ottawa, and the Privy Council in London — the final Court of Appeal for all the British Colonies. He varied his court work by preparing opinions on the many very important matters on which he was being constantly consulted. He soon became the acknowledged leader of the Bar in Ontario, if not the greatest counsel in Canada, and he was engaged in many of the most important and interest ing legal conflicts that have occurred since the birth of the Dominion. Not only has he fought good rights and won victories, or credit and renown, in his own Province, but he has done so in the West, in London, and in Paris; in strenuous fights, interprovincial and international; against criminals fighting for their lives; provinces struggling to expand; huge corporations eager for gain. He has been in the fray when the foremost nations of the world have wrestled with^brain and tongue for the untold riches of the sea and of the land. Let us glance at a few of these contents. The Hon. Thomas D'Arcy McGee was " in the sixties" the most eloquent and one of the most brilliant members of the Canadian Parliament. In early life he had been a friend of the agitators who had for so many years opposed everything British in Ireland, but on this side of the Atlantic he had be come a loyal citizen and a faithful minister of the Crown. Returning home from his parliamentary duties on the night of the seventh -day of April, 1868, he was felo niously, wilfully, and of malice aforethought, killed by one Patrick James Whalen. The

country was shocked at the deed. It was believed that the assasination had been the work of an emissary of a foreign society, because of the change in McGee's views on Irish affairs. Every effort was made to secure the acquittal of the assassin by his brilliant counsel, the Hon. John Hillyard Cameron, but the jury brought in a verdict of guilty, an application thereupon was made for a writ of error. The errors alleged involving many difficult and abstruse ques tions in criminal practice, such as, whether a special commission to the judge to take the assize at which Whalen was condemned was necessary; whether the award of jury process was correctly framed; whether a distinction existed between justices of oyer and terminer and general gaol de livery; whether the judge had been right in disallowing Whalen's challenge of one Sparks for favor as not being indifferent (he having said that if on the jury he would hang him) the prisoner not having then exhausted all his peremptory challenges; had the prisoner a right to challenge per emptorily his full number of jurors in addi tion to Sparks. Mr. Robinson was the senior counsel for the Crown and his argu ments both before the Court of Queen's Bench and afterwards in the Court of Error and Appeal were masterful efforts, show ing most minute and accurate knowledge of criminal jurisprudence and procedure as contained in the books, from the days of black letter law to the then latest decisions of the American courts, effecting the matters in dispute. His arguments were success ful; and although the courts held that the learned judge who had tried the case was wrong in not allowing the challenge for cause, yet as the prisoner and the Crown had both (in deference to the opinion of the judge) treated the challenge as a per emptory challenge and proceeded with the trial, Whalen could not now appeal against the decision of the trial judge. The pris oner wished for a further respite to appeal to the Privy Council — but this was not