PROSECUTION OF WOODFALL AND ALMON.
Almost every act which the government now committed tended only to excite the public clamour and indignation. During this summer it involved itself in new troubles, and exposed itself to fiercer attacks, by prosecuting the printers and publishers of Junius’s Letters. In the month of June Woodfall was tried for printing in his newspaper, the “Public Advertiser,” one of these letters, which was addressed to his majesty, and was considered a scandalous libel; and Almon was tried for selling a re-publication of it in the “London Museum.” Almon was found guilty of publishing, and was sentenced to pay a fine of ten marks, and find security for his good behaviour for two years. Woodfall was found “guilty of printing and publishing only” and in his case, the defendant moved to stay the entering of judgment on the verdict, while the attorney-general moved for a rule on the defendant, to show cause why the verdict should not be entered according to the legal import of the words. The attorney-general’s motion was attended to first; and when the matter came to be argued in the court of King’s Bench, Lord Mansfield, before whom both cases had been tried, went regularly through the whole evidence, as well as his own charge to the jury. After recapitulating the defence on the trial, his lordship remarked: “I directed the jury, that if they believed the innuendoes, as to persons and things, to have been properly filled up in the information, and to be the true meaning of the paper, and if they gave credit to the witnesses, they must find the defendant guilty. If the jury were obliged to determine whether the paper was in law a libel or not, or to judge whether it was criminal, or to what degree; or if they were to require proofs of a criminal intention—then this direction was wrong. I told them, as I have always told them before, that whether a libel or not, was a mere question of law arising out of the record, and that all the epithets inserted in the information were formal inferences of law. A general verdict of the jury finds only what the law implies from the fact, for that is scarcely possible to be produced: the law implies from the act of publication, a criminal intent.” After some further remarks of minor importance his lordship continued: “The motion of the attorney-general divides itself into two parts; first, to fill up the finding of the jury with the usual words of reference, so as to connect the verdict with the information: the omission of these words, we are of opinion, is a technical mistake of the clerk, and may be now supplied. The second head of the argument is to omit the word ‘only’ in the entry of the verdict: this we are all of opinion cannot be done. The word ‘only’ must stand in the verdict; if this word was omitted, the verdict would then be, ‘guilty of printing and publishing,’ which is a general verdict of guilty; for there is no other charge in the information but printing and publishing, and that alone the jury had to inquire. We are all of opinion, that my direction to the jury is right and according to law; the positions contained in it never were doubted; it never has been, nor is it now complained of in this court. There clearly can be no judgment of acquittal, because the fact found by the jury is the only question they had to try; the single doubt that remains, is concerning the meaning of the word ‘only.’” The court considering that the word “only” had been used in an ambiguous sense, ordered Woodfall a new trial on that ground; but when it came on, the attorney-general remarked that he had not the original newspaper by which he could prove the publication Thus terminated the second trial: the want of this was fatal to the cause.