the old people, and rifled the houses to the value of two thousand five hundred pounds.
This miscreant continued his depredations two years longer, until one of his accomplices confessed his crime, and informed upon all who were concerned. Our adventurer was seized at his lodgings in Little Suffolk Street, and conveyed to Salisbury, where he acknowledged his crime. He was a second time executed, and, to prevent a second resurrection, he was hung in chains near the place where the crime was perpetrated.
Pressing To Death
The horrid punishment of pressing to death, which the English law imposes on persons standing mute when put on their trial, was frequently inflicted in former times, and some instances of it are even to be met with, of as late a date as the reign of George II.
At the Kilkenny assizes, in 1740, one Matthew Ryan was tried for highway robbery. When he was apprehended, he pretended to be a lunatic, stripped himself in the gaol, threw away his clothes, and could not be prevailed upon to put them on again, but went as he was to the court to take his trial. He then affected to be dumb, and would not plead; on which the judges ordered a jury to be impanelled, to inquire and give their opinion, whether he was mute and lunatic by the hand of God or wilfully so. The jury returned in a short time, and brought in a verdict of ‘Wilful and affected dumbness and lunacy.’ The judges on this desired the prisoner to plead; but he still pretended to be insensible to all that was said to him. The law now called for the peine forte et dure; but the judges compassionately deferred awarding it until a future day, in the hope that he might in the meantime acquire a juster sense of his situation. When again brought up however, the criminal persisted in his refusal to plead; and the court at last pronounced the dreadful sentence, that he should be pressed to death. This sentence was accordingly executed upon him two days after, in the public market of Kilkenny. As the weights were heaping on the wretched man, he earnestly supplicated to be hanged; but it being beyond the power of the sheriff to deviate from the mode of punishment prescribed in the sentence, even this was an indulgence which could no longer be granted to him.
In England, the latest instance (we believe) of a similar kind occurred in a case where Baron Thompson presided as judge. It is an odious and revolting mode of satisfying public justice; yet it is only a necessary adjunct to that fondness of capital punishments which pervades, and is a stain to the whole of the English penal code.
Confessions Of A Highwayman
Henry Simms was tried and executed for a highway robbery in 1745, after conviction he gave the following account of his exploits:
‘I will begin,’ says he, ‘with my nativity. I was born in the parish of St Martin in the Fields, in the county of Middlesex, and should be thirty-one years of age, were I to live until next October; my parents who were honest people, died when I was an infant, and after their deaths, I was taken into the care of my grandmother, who lived in St James’s parish, Westminster, who was the wife of a commissioned officer in his late majesty’s land forces, and is still living, and receives a widow’s pension from the crown.
This good old woman, when I was but six years of age, put me to school to one of her own religion, she being a Dissenter; but not approving of his way of teaching, she took me from him, and sent me to an academy in Charles-street, St James’s, where I learnt arithmetic throughout, and some French and Latin; but frequently playing truant, I often ran into vice, before I was nine years of age, and frequently laid out nights, with other boys as wicked as myself; for which ill practices my grandmother used to correct me severely.
The first fact I ever committed was before I was ten years old. My Grandmother went to pay a visit to a Dissenting minister, at one Mr Palmer’s, a soap-boiler, in
This miscreant continued his depredations two years longer, until one of his accomplices confessed his crime, and informed upon all who were concerned. Our adventurer was seized at his lodgings in Little Suffolk Street, and conveyed to Salisbury, where he acknowledged his crime. He was a second time executed, and, to prevent a second resurrection, he was hung in chains near the place where the crime was perpetrated.
Pressing To Death
The horrid punishment of pressing to death, which the English law imposes on persons standing mute when put on their trial, was frequently inflicted in former times, and some instances of it are even to be met with, of as late a date as the reign of George II.
At the Kilkenny assizes, in 1740, one Matthew Ryan was tried for highway robbery. When he was apprehended, he pretended to be a lunatic, stripped himself in the gaol, threw away his clothes, and could not be prevailed upon to put them on again, but went as he was to the court to take his trial. He then affected to be dumb, and would not plead; on which the judges ordered a jury to be impanelled, to inquire and give their opinion, whether he was mute and lunatic by the hand of God or wilfully so. The jury returned in a short time, and brought in a verdict of ‘Wilful and affected dumbness and lunacy.’ The judges on this desired the prisoner to plead; but he still pretended to be insensible to all that was said to him. The law now called for the peine forte et dure; but the judges compassionately deferred awarding it until a future day, in the hope that he might in the meantime acquire a juster sense of his situation. When again brought up however, the criminal persisted in his refusal to plead; and the court at last pronounced the dreadful sentence, that he should be pressed to death. This sentence was accordingly executed upon him two days after, in the public market of Kilkenny. As the weights were heaping on the wretched man, he earnestly supplicated to be hanged; but it being beyond the power of the sheriff to deviate from the mode of punishment prescribed in the sentence, even this was an indulgence which could no longer be granted to him.
In England, the latest instance (we believe) of a similar kind occurred in a case where Baron Thompson presided as judge. It is an odious and revolting mode of satisfying public justice; yet it is only a necessary adjunct to that fondness of capital punishments which pervades, and is a stain to the whole of the English penal code.
Confessions Of A Highwayman
Henry Simms was tried and executed for a highway robbery in 1745, after conviction he gave the following account of his exploits:
‘I will begin,’ says he, ‘with my nativity. I was born in the parish of St Martin in the Fields, in the county of Middlesex, and should be thirty-one years of age, were I to live until next October; my parents who were honest people, died when I was an infant, and after their deaths, I was taken into the care of my grandmother, who lived in St James’s parish, Westminster, who was the wife of a commissioned officer in his late majesty’s land forces, and is still living, and receives a widow’s pension from the crown.
This good old woman, when I was but six years of age, put me to school to one of her own religion, she being a Dissenter; but not approving of his way of teaching, she took me from him, and sent me to an academy in Charles-street, St James’s, where I learnt arithmetic throughout, and some French and Latin; but frequently playing truant, I often ran into vice, before I was nine years of age, and frequently laid out nights, with other boys as wicked as myself; for which ill practices my grandmother used to correct me severely.
The first fact I ever committed was before I was ten years old. My Grandmother went to pay a visit to a Dissenting minister, at one Mr Palmer’s, a soap-boiler, in
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