The Lord Justice Clerk and Lords Commissioners of Justiciary, in respect of the verdict before recorded, decern and adjudge the said William Burke, pannel, to be carried from the bar back to the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, therein to be detained, and to be fed on bread and water only, in terms of an act of Parliament passed in the 25th year of the reign of His Majesty King George the Second, entitled “an Act for preventing the horrid crime of murder,” until Wednesday the twenty-eighth day of January next to come, and upon that day to be taken furth of the said tolbooth to the common place of execution in the Lawnmarket of Edinburgh, and then and there, between the hours of eight and ten o’clock before noon of the said day, to be hanged by the neck by the hands of the common executioner upon a gibbet until he be dead, and his body thereafter to be delivered to Dr. Alexander Munro, Professor of Anatomy in the University of Edinburgh, to be by him publicly dissected and anatomized, in terms of the said act, and ordain all his moveable goods and gear to be escheat and inbrought to His Majesty’s use, which is pronounced for doom.
| (Signed) | D. Boyle, | |
| A. Maconochie, | ||
| J. H. Mackenzie. |
Counsel for the Crown, the Lord Advocate, Robert Dundas, Esq., Archibald Alison, Esq., and Alexander Wood, Esq., Advocate Deputies, James Tytler, Esq., Crown Agent.
Counsel for Burke, Sir James W. Moncrieff, Bart., Dean of Faculty, Patrick Robertson, Mark Napier, and David Milne, Esqrs.
Counsel for M‘Dougal, Henry Cockburn, Duncan M‘Neil, Hugh Bruce, and George Patton, Esqrs.
Agent for both pannels, James Beveridge, Esq. W. S. one of the agents for the poor.
We understand that the learned counsel above named, all very handsomely gave their services to the prisoners gratuitously.
Having thus given a faithful account of the judicial proceedings in this important trial, it will not, we trust, be an unacceptable supplement if we subjoin some particulars connected with it, which might indeed have been interwoven in the progress of the foregoing report, but which would have only incumbered the technical details that are, of course, most interesting. To these particulars we may add such other facts connected with the nefarious system of murder which had been organized among us as have transpired since the trial; and in an affair which has excited the most extraordinary sensation ever perhaps known in Scotland, in reference to crimes of a private nature, it seems desirable not only to give a complete and connected account of them, but to collect and embody along with it, in a single record, the various expressions of public feeling, as these have come forth through the press in all parts of the country.