And is condemned most innocently;
The God above he knows the same,
And will send a mitigation for his pain.'
The paper on which the above rhymes were written, contained also some notes in the prisoner's hand-writing, which appeared to be private notes to assist the memory in some communications that he intended to make relative to the manner in which subjects are obtained at the hospitals, the conduct of watchmen, &c.
The evidence of May's guilt we never considered on the trial to be conclusive; and, in fact, so general was the opinion, that his acquittal was considered as put beyond a doubt. His subsequent escape from an ignominious death may, in reality, be ascribed to the joint statements of Bishop and Williams; and this leads us to the discussion of the justice of the punishment, which has been subsequently inflicted on May. We espouse his cause on the abstract principle of right and justice, and in accordance with that principle, we would punish the guilty, and pardon the innocent. The indictment against May stated, that, in conjunction with Bishop and Williams, he had murdered an Italian boy, of the name of Carlo Ferrari; and another count stated, that he had been an accomplice in the murder of some other person unknown. On this indictment he was found guilty, and sentenced to be executed. On the confession, however, of the murderers themselves, it appeared that May had no participation whatever in the crime, and that he was wholly ignorant of the manner in which the body of the boy had been procured, but supposed that it had been obtained by the usual method of exhumation. It was acknowledged that he assisted in the attempt to dispose of it, on the ground that he was enabled to obtain a higher price, and that, in the attempt to dispose of it at the King's College, he was apprehended, and finally committed to prison to take his trial as an accomplice in the murder. The sequel of that trial is already known; and his life was spared, it having been made evident to the competent authorities that he was neither a principal in the murder nor an accessory after it. The great question, then, is, and which involves a very important point in the administration of justice of this country, for what crime has May been sentenced to the severest punishment, with the exception of death, which our sanguinary code exhibits, namely, transportation for life? He was either guilty or innocent of the murder,—the most cogent and valid testimony was adduced in favour of the latter, and it was considered so conclusive, that a respite was granted. In the eye of the law he therefore stood assoilzed from the crime for which he was tried, and therefore not subject to any punishment. If it be urged that his participation in the attempt to dispose of the body of the murdered boy rendered him amenable to the laws, and, being taken in delicto flagrante, to the punishment attached to that act, we perfectly coincide in the proposition; but then, as the law now stands, the having a dead body in our possession is not a felony, but simply a misdemeanour, and punishable, as all other misdemeanours, by imprisonment, hard labour, or whipping. Of what crime then, we repeat it, has May been found guilty, to subject him to the punishment of transportation for life. The confessions of both Bishop and Williams distinctly negatived the fact that May had the slightest participation in any of the murders committed by them, and that he even did not know in what manner they had procured the body, in the attempted sale of which he gave his assistance. If the simple fact of rendering that assistance rendered him subject to punishment, how, then, comes it to pass, that no punishment has been inflicted on Shields, who, with the exception of negotiating with the purchasers of the body, was, setting the murder out of the question, as deeply implicated in the affair as May himself. The entire gist of this extraordinary business lies simply in the following question,—After the respite was sent to May, for the commission of what crime was he then detained in prison, for which he had been tried, or was yet to be tried? We know it may be urged that it is a rule, that if, through the royal clemency, the life of a criminal sentenced to death be spared, his punishment is commuted to transportation for life; but then these general cases do not apply to the individual one of May. The respited criminals still stand convicted of the crime for which, by the laws of their country, their lives became forfeit; and although the royal clemency steps in to prevent the sacrifice of human life, their offended country still demands their punishment, and the next severest to death itself is inflicted upon them. Those cases will not, however, apply to May. He was tried at the bar of his country for murder, and a jury of that country, on account of a long chain of circumstantial evidence, many of the links of which snapped in the attempt to force them to their utmost influence, found him guilty of the crime charged in the indictment;—he received the usual sentence of death, and, according to all human calculation, his hours on earth were numbered. As it has frequently happened in the cases of criminals sentenced to death, a subsequent investigation took place in regard to the guilt of May, or, indeed, to any participation on his part in the murder of the individual for which he was indicted. From the coincident testimony of the real murderers, it was most distinctly made to appear that May was wholly innocent, not only of any participation in the crime, but that he was actually ignorant of the manner in which the body of the boy had been procured. The judge himself who tried the prisoners fully coincided in the propriety of granting a respite to May, founded on the confessions of Bishop and Williams; and his innocence was at length so strongly confirmed, that his life was spared. But we now come to the great question,—On what condition?—That he should be transported for life. Here, then, in the most enlightened nation of the world, whose courts of judicature are held up as the pattern for all surrounding nations—whose laws are boasted of as being founded on mercy, clemency, and truth,—here we have the example of an individual tried, condemned—found innocent, and respited—but still punished with the next severest punishment after death which the criminal code of his country could inflict upon him! May could not be deemed, in the eye of the law, innocent and guilty at the same time; but if he was declared to be the former, he had a right to expect all the benefits and advantages of that innocence. There was no intermediate state of guilt; he was either guilty of the murder, or not guilty; and as his innocence was made manifest, he ought to have been placed in the same situation as he would have been had the verdict of Not Guilty been pronounced upon him by his Jury.
It was owing to these sentiments operating so powerfully on our mind, that we were led to analyze a little more closely than we might otherwise have done, the speech of the Duke of Sussex, in which he enlarges in such laudatory terms on the enviable superiority of our courts of law, and the manner in which justice is administered in them; and all this on an occasion in which a man, afterwards discovered to be innocent, is condemned to death, and who would certainly have suffered but for the concurrent testimony of his associates, on which his innocence was established.
We are aware that not one of our contemporaries has taken this view of the case of May; and until we are informed of the crime which May committed, and for which he was tried and convicted at the bar of his country, we shall always consider that his transportation is an indelible stain upon the judicature of this country, and that an irreparable injury has been done to the individual, for which no after redress can be sufficient.
The public mind, in the mean time, was by no means at rest respecting the identity of the body of Carlo Ferrari; and as it involved some very nice points connected with the manner in which the prosecution was got up, Mr. Corder, on the 8th of December, appeared at Bow-street, before Sir Richard Birnie and Mr. Minshull, attended by Joseph Paragalli and Andrew Colla, the two Italian witnesses who gave evidence on the trial of Bishop, Williams, and May, at the Old Bailey, on Friday, the 5th instant, and stated, that in consequence of the confessions made by Bishop and Williams, denying that the body found and sworn to was that of the Italian boy, the two witnesses now present were most anxious to remove an impression which had gone abroad, in consequence of the confessions referred to, and wished to reiterate their firm belief that the body of the boy brought to King's College for sale was that of Carlo Ferrari.
Paragalli and Colla then came forward and reasserted their former evidence.
Mr. Corder said that there were strong grounds for believing that the confessions of Bishop and Williams, so far as related to their statement that the body found in their possession was not that of the Italian boy, was wholly untrue; and in consequence of the denial put forth in their confessions, which appeared in some degree to cast discredit upon the whole prosecution, the parish of St. Paul, Covent Garden, had determined to publish a statement in a few days of the whole transaction, in order to relieve the public mind from the doubts occasioned by the confessions of Bishop and Williams. He was perfectly satisfied, that when that statement was submitted to the public, there would no longer be any doubt upon the subject, and that the body found in the possession of Bishop, Williams, and May, was not that of the drover's boy, but the body of Carlo Ferrari.