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., Part 837), are these words, printed as I give them below:
“‘GUILTY. He then PLEADED GUILTY to a conviction of obtaining goods by false pretenses at this Court on February 26, 1896. Judgment respited.’
“Pleaded guilty to a former conviction! Adolf Beck pleaded guilty to nothing. How could he plead guilty, being an innocent man! He cried aloud when the charge of the first conviction was read aloud to him, ‘As God is my witness, I was innocent then as I am innocent now.’
“The epilogue to the tragedy of our English Dreyfus is written in those damning words in the Sessions Paper, the official minutes of evidence in Central Criminal Court trials.
“Beck’s last hope had perished. Once more a merciless fate had blinded the eyes and closed the ears of Justice to his innocence. He was to be immured in a convict cell for ten, perhaps for fourteen, years; he was to pass the closing years of his life a branded felon amid all the horrors of a convict prison. In all human probability he would die without ever seeing the light of freedom again, for he could not have borne this second torture.
“His voice, crying aloud for freedom, would be heard no more. Petitions for a reinvestigation of his case would be hopeless. He had been robbed of his last earthly chance of proving his innocence.
“Those words, ‘The prisoner pleaded guilty to a former conviction,’ would have damned him to the last day of his life.
“My painful task is ended.
“A foreigner, a stranger within our gates, a man of kindly heart and gentle ways, has been foully wronged. There is but one reparation we can make him. The people of this country owe him a testimonial of sympathy that shall endure and remain. On the site of his martyrdom there should rise a national monument. Let that monument take the form of a Court of Criminal Appeal. That is the one reparation that the English people can make to Adolf Beck for the foul wrong he has suffered in their midst.”
In a sense the innocent man who is hanged may be regarded as better off than he who is called upon to endure lifelong imprisonment. There are plenty of examples of these judicial murders. Over a score of undoubted cases occurred in the first two decades of the last century, and since then there have been twice as many more. A notorious and awful case was that of Eliza Fenning, who, at eighteen years of age, was sent to the gallows upon the perjured evidence of an accomplice of the real murderer. The latter afterward confessed.
Another similar case occurred in 1850, when a man named Ross was executed for poisoning his young wife by mixing arsenic with her food. A few years later certain facts came to light, proving conclusively that the real criminal was a female acquaintance and confidante of the dead woman.
Thomas Perryman, again, was found guilty in 1879 of the murder of his aged mother on the very flimsiest of evidence. His sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life, and in the ordinary course of events he should now be free. More than 100,000 people have, at different times, petitioned for the release of this convict, and the highest judicial authorities have expressed their belief in his entire innocence of the crime imputed to him. Yet he has been compelled to drink his terrible cup to the bitter dregs.
In 1844 a gentleman named Barker was sentenced to penal servitude for life for a forgery of which he was afterward proved to have been wholly innocent. He served four years, and was then released and readmitted to practise as an attorney. In 1859, eleven years after having been “pardoned,” he was, upon the recommendation of a Select Committee of the House of Commons, voted a sum of £5,000, “as a national acknowledgment of the wrong he had suffered from an erroneous prosecution.”
The famous Edlingham case will doubtless be fresh in the minds of most people. In February, 1879, the village vicarage was entered by burglars, and a determined attempt was made to murder the aged incumbent. For this outrage two men, Brannagham and Murphy, were sentenced to lifelong imprisonment. After a lapse of nine years the crime was confessed to by two well-known criminals named Richardson and Edgell, the result being that the innocent convicts were released, with an honorarium of £800 apiece.
The eminent King’s Counsel, Sir George Lewis, has openly said that he will not allow himself to speak of the way in which the “Edalji” trial was conducted, and he further adds: “I have it on undoubted authority that every ‘M.P.’ connected with the legal profession believes as I do that that man is innocent. And yet a declaration from such a source is allowed by the public to pass unnoticed. As I have before stated, ‘it is not the business of the public, nor of individual citizens, to prove the innocence of any unhappy person whom the process of law selects for punishment; but it is the business of every citizen to see that the courts incontestably prove the guilt of any person accused of a crime before sentence is passed.’ Neither condition was fulfilled in the case of the prisoner. I have studied the evidence, and say, from knowledge gained by fifteen years’ association with criminals, that this unfortunate young man is innocent.” Surely after the disclosures of the Adolf Beck case this one, on the word of Sir George Lewis, ought to receive unbiased consideration from the Home Office.