Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder by Kate Colquhoun

CHAPTER 19
    Gathering Clouds
    Wagons and carriages jostled against each other outside the Chambers Street court on Saturday morning as eager spectators hurried to arrive on time. The ladies’ wide cotton crinolines filled the corridors as they pressed into the courtroom, their straw bonnets competing with the gentlemen’s toppers. Along with the pack of newspapermen, they waited keenly for the arrival of the German prisoner, wondering aloud what Shaffer and Blankman might achieve in Müller’s defence.
    Blankman began by asking for a postponement, citing the exceedingly intricate and voluminous nature of the depositions and the fact that they had been given only ten minutes to confer with their client. As precedents, he cited two recent cases in which the British government had obfuscated over American demands for the extradition of two men accused of murder. The first concerned a negro slave called Anderson who had fled to Canada. The case had been delayed for months, said Blankman, before it was finally adjudicated in London and then Anderson had been released on the grounds that, as a slave, he had been justified in making his escape by any means. The second casecentred on the murderous capture of an American vessel, the Chesapeake , by American men who had fled to Liverpool. Again, said Blankman, the British government had prevaricated for months before refusing American demands to return them for trial.
    I do not claim that because one nation refused to do right another should follow its example, he averred, appealing to a latent American hostility to a perception that their former colonial masters had behaved with patrician arrogance. The court erupted into applause .
    Further, contended Blankman, no finding from a coroner’s inquest had been produced for the American court. Since the jury at the inquest in Hackney had not yet returned a verdict, the case for murder had not been made and, if the inquest’s judgement were to be one of manslaughter, then there was no provision for prisoner extradition within the law. Our client positively asserts his entire innocence of the charge , concluded the lawyer. The small delay we seek is as little as the court could grant.
    Francis Marbury, counsel for the British Crown, calmly countered that ex-judge Beebe had spent an evening with the prisoner in order to discuss his defence, that the depositions were neither long nor intricate, that they had been painstakingly read out in court and that Müller’s defence had, in sum, had enough time to prepare. He considered the defence’s request for postponement to be unreasonable. All the judge has to do , he argued, is act like an ordinary magistrate . He was not asking for a determination of guilt, simply for a committal to trial. I dislike , he continued, to do anything which looks like bearing harshly upon this unfortunate man, but the case seems so plain and the man, if sent back, will be placed where will be found all the witnesses who can testify as to the facts and who will state any circumstances of exculpation, if any such exist. The London detectives and witnesses were in New York at great expense, he argued. A postponement would cause great inconvenience.
    And so the argument rocked backwards and forwards between the two lawyers while the witnesses and prisoner sat mute. Was the British Crown really so penny-pinching, wondered Blankman, and what of the interests of justice? Were the rights of the prisoner not to be protected? Were German and American citizens to be left wondering at the partiality of the law?
    Commissioner Newton denied the request for postponement. The evidence was short, he said, and he could not believe that the interests of the prisoner would suffer by his refusal.
    There were no witnesses for the defence and the defendant Franz Müller had no right in law to speak, except through his counsel. So, Chauncey Shaffer, known for his blistering oratory, went into battle. There is something of sublimity in