were, I fear, responsible for a very curious blunder in procedure.
Whilst Mr. Justice Cave was giving his last instructions to the jury, of which Byrne and I took notes, I added to my note, “During this direction of the judge the prisoner was absent.” I called Byrne’s attention to this fact, and he decided to make a note of it and say nothing.
Blair afterwards considered that if he moved for a writ of error the fact of the prisoner’s absence might be held to invalidate the verdict, so jealously is the right of a prisoner to be present during his trial guarded by the English law.
Nothing was done in the matter because of the two further indictments. Still, had the trial been concluded in normal working hours, such a blunder would not have been made by judge or clerk of assize.
And now the jury return and answer to their names. The gaslights flare up. Doors swing backwards and forwards as counsel and officials come hurrying into court. From behind the javelin men crowds press eagerly forward at the back of the court, and tired faces peer through the darkness of the gallery, whence you hear murmurs and sighs of relief that at last the moment waited for is at hand. The wretched woman, tottering to the front of the dock, is the colour of the parchment upon which her crime is indicted. She is asked why sentence should not be pronounced. She clings to the rails and begins slowly and firmly, “I am
quite innocent. I am not guilty at all,” and then breaks into piteous sobs and tears, and the female warder holds her in position as if she were being photographed. The judge’s clerk, who is stifling a yawn, has placed the black cap on his master’s wig. The judge in his nasal, solemn tones gets to the sentence in as few personal words as may be. The woman shrieks out “I never administered anything at all to Mary Dixon! Nothing whatever!” And when the judge reaches in resolute, mournful syllables the formal death sentence, the human voice that utters it seems to toll like a harsh metal bell hopelessly and inevitably beating out the last official message of the law: “And that is that you be taken from here to the prison from whence you came, that from thence you be taken to a place of execution, and that there you be hanged by the neck until you be dead, and that your body be buried within the precincts of the prison——” But the final prayer that the Lord may have mercy on her soul is lost in the wild, terror-stricken cries of the woman for mercy as they unfasten her fingers from the rails and carry her down the stairs towards the gaol, and her shrieks and sobs come echoing out of the stone passages below into the darkening court from which her fellow-creatures are slinking away in horror.
The only other murder case in which I was engaged, and in which the sentence of death was passed, was in 1889—a case in which I prosecuted as junior to Falkner Blair—and the facts remain vividly in my memory.
Reg. .v Dukes, or the Bury murder, as it was called, attracted widespread interest. Dukes was manager of one of a series of furniture shops belonging to the Gordon Furnishing Company, the central shop of which was in Strangeways, Manchester. The business was owned by an old man named Gordon, who had two sons, Meyer and George. The family were Jews. George Gordon visited the Bury shop every Tuesday. There seems no doubt that Dukes had been stealing the takings, and for a month before the murder he kept on sending to Manchester bogus letters and telegrams about business with the intention of keeping George Gordon away from Bury. For three or four Tuesdays he had not made his usual visit, and when he did come on the morning of Tuesday, September 24, Dukes was not there, but, as we learned afterwards, was lying hid and drinking in a neighbouring public-house. Gordon examined the books and waited for Dukes, and then returned to Manchester.
There he seemed to have consulted with his father, and returned to Bury. Meanwhile, Dukes had followed George Gordon to Manchester, called at the central shop, and made a statement that he had been in Manchester on business all day, that he was returning to Bury, and would take a message from the father, which he did. At Bury he now met George Gordon. The shopboy was sent off by Dukes with some furniture to an address that proved to be an empty house. When he left with the cart about 2.30, Gordon and Dukes were alone in the shop
together. He heard them talking as he drove away. Within a few minutes Dukes had killed Gordon with a hammer, striking him on the back of his head.