Читать книгу The Gun Alley Tragedy: Record of the Trial of Colin Campbell Ross онлайн

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No Court and no Judge has, therefore, ever pronounced judgment on the correctness or incorrectness of the jury’s verdict. All that they have said is that there was some evidence on which the jury could find as it did, and that that being so, the responsibility for the verdict must rest with the tribunal which the law has set up to pronounce upon the evidence. The purpose of this review of the case is to show, not that the Appellate Courts were wrong, but that there are strong grounds for believing that the jury was wrong. And that brings us naturally to a second preliminary point.

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Not often, indeed, do juries err on the side of convicting an innocent man. But the circumstances of this case were peculiar. Not merely was the ravishing of the child and the strangling of her a crime of a peculiarly detestable nature, but the stripping of the body, and the placing of it on the cold stones of a squalid alley, though it really added nothing to the horror of her death, was an incident well calculated to excite the deepest human sympathy. In addition, it was a crime of which none but a degenerate would be guilty, and it is an extremely unfortunate thing that at the inquest the Coroner allowed, under the guise of evidence, statements to be made by witnesses which would tend to show that Ross was such a degenerate. Those statements were not allowed to be made on the trial for the simple reason that they violated the fundamental rules of evidence. The Coroner allowed them in, holding that he was not bound by the rules of evidence, and apparently labouring under the impression that the laws of evidence are arbitrary rules, tending at times to obscure the truth, instead of being, as they are, rules evolved from the experience of the ages as being best calculated to bring out the truth. There was probably no truth in the statements made, for the plain fact is that Ross had never been charged with a sexual offence, and had never even been questioned about one. But such was the interest in the case that every line written about it was eagerly devoured, and not one member of the jury was likely to have forgotten what was said on that head at the inquest—false though it all may have been.