The case was tried before Mr. Baron Martin, and although the evidence was extremely conflicting, the learned judge said that he thought it quite conclusive against the prisoner. He summed up strongly for a conviction, and the jury brought in a verdict of guilty, whereon Pellizioni was sentenced to be hanged. This result was not accepted as satisfactory by many thoughtful people, and the matter was taken up by the Press, notably by the Daily Telegraph. Some of the condemned convict’s compatriots became deeply interested in him. It was known that in the locality of Saffron Hill he bore the repute of a singularly quiet and inoffensive man. Ultimately, a priest, who laboured among these poor Italians, saved Justice from official murder by bringing one of his flock to confess that he and not Pellizioni had struck the fatal blows. This was one Gregorio Mogni, but he protested that he had acted only in self-defence.
Mogni was forthwith arrested, tried, and convicted of the crime, with the strange result that now two men lay in Newgate, both condemned, independently not jointly, of one and the same crime. If Mogni had struck the blows, clearly Pellizioni could not have done so. Moreover, a new fact was elicited at Mogni’s trial, and this was the production—for the first time—of the weapon used. It was a knife, and this knife had been found some distance from the scene of the crime, where it could not have been thrown by Pellizioni. And again, it was known and sworn to as Mogni’s knife, which, after stabbing the men, he had handed to a friend to take away.
The gravamen of the charge against the police was that they had found the knife before Pellizioni was tried. It was at once recognised all through Saffron Hill that it was Mogni’s knife, and with so much current gossip it was hardly credible that the police were not also informed of this fact. Yet, fearing to damage their case (a surely permissible inference), they kept back the knife at the first trial. It was afterwards said to have been in court, but it certainly was not produced, while it is equally certain that its identification would have quite altered the issue, and that Pellizioni would not have been condemned. The defence, in his case, went the length of declaring that to this questionable proceeding the police added false swearing. No doubt they stuck manfully to their chief and to each other, but they hardly displayed the open and impartial mind that should characterise all officers of justice. In any case, it was not their fault that an innocent man was not hanged.
WILLIAM HABRON.
The strange circumstances which led to the righting of this judicial wrong must give the Habron case a pre-eminence among others of the kind. The mistake arose from the ungovernable temper of the accused, who threatened to shoot a certain police officer, under the impression that he had been injured by him.
In July, 1875, two brothers, William and John Habron, were taken before the magistrates of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, near Manchester, charged with drunkenness. Grave doubts, were, however, expressed in court as to the identity of William Habron. The chief witness, constable Cock, was very positive; he knew the man, he said, because he had so often threatened reprisals if interfered with. But the magistrates gave William the benefit of the doubt, and discharged him. As he left the court he passed Cock and said, “I’ll do for you yet. I shall shoot you before the night is out.”
Others heard the threat, but thought little of it, among them Superintendent Bent, of the Manchester police. That same night Bent was roused out with the news that Cock had been shot. He ran round to West Point, where the unfortunate officer lay dying, and although unable to obtain from him any distinct indication of the murderer, he concluded at once that John Habron must be the man. He knew where the brothers lodged, and taking with him a force of police, he surrounded the house. “If it is anyone,” said the master of the house and employer of the accused, “it is William—he has such an abominable temper.” All three brothers—William, John, and Frank Habron—were arrested in their beds and taken to the police-station. In the morning a strict examination of the ground where Cock had been shot revealed a number of footmarks. The Habrons’ boots were brought to the spot and found to fit these marks exactly.
The evidence told chiefly against William Habron, who was identified as the man who had bought some cartridges in a shop in Manchester. Both William and John brought witnesses to prove an alibi, but this failed under cross-examination. Again, they sought to prove that they had gone home to bed at nine o’clock on the night of the murder, while other witnesses swore to seeing them drinking at eleven p.m. in a public-house which Cock must have passed soon after that hour on his way to West Point, the spot where he was found murdered. The fact of William Habron’s animus against the constable was elicited from several witnesses, but what told most against the prisoners was the contradictory character of the defence. William Habron alone was convicted, and sentenced to penal servitude.