The Sun.
London, England, 1864-02-09 00:00:00

MALT DUTY.

The CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER obtained
icave to bring in a bill to allow the making of malt duty
free to be used in the feeding of cattle, and explained that he
only asked for a permissive measure for two years.
TREATMENT OF CRIMINAL LUNATICS.

Sir G. GREY, In rising to bring in a bill to amend th
7.aw relating `-„o the cars and treatment of criminal lunatics,
said—Sir, I think I ought at the outset to state to you what
is the existing form of the law on that subject which I pro-
pose to amend. The present law is contained in the 3d and
4th of her Majesty's present reign, chap. 24, sec. 1. That
Act was an amendment to the Act which was previously in
force-9th and 10th Geo. IV., chap. 40, sec. 55. That was
a general Act to amend the laws for the regulation of
county lunatic asylums; and the object was more effectu•
ally to provide for the maintenance of criminal lunatics in
England and Wales. Explaining the condition of the law
before the present Act was passed, the right hon. gentle-
'Dian said it might be considered as applicable to two classes
of. Prisoners only, who on,being certified to be insane, might
be removed to a lunatic asylum. The two classes of priso-
ners were those undergoing a sentence of imprisonment in
borough or county gaols, and those under sentence of trans-
portation ; and the Act provided that they might be certi-
fied to be insane by two physicians or surgeons, and on the
certificate being received by the Secretary of State, it should
be lawful for him to direct, by a warrant of removal, that
the person CO certified to be insane should be removed to
acme lunatic asylum, there to be detained until he was cer-
tified to have become sane by two physicians or surgeons ;
in. which case, upon• the receipt of
such certificate, the
if
Se-
cretary of State, the term of imprisonment were expired
hould be empowered to discharge him, and if not expired,
to send him back to prison, with a view to his under-
going the remainder of his punishment. In 1810 that
provision was revived, and the present law was passed
making material alterations. The first alteration related
to the class of prisoners who were included in the
operation of the law. The object of the Act seems to
have been to remove insane persons of all descriptions
charged with any crime from the prisons in which they were
confined, and to subject them to proper medical care and
treatment in some lunatic asylum. The first alteration in
the law passed in 1840 was that all classes of criminal luna-
tics were included in the provisions of that Act. The right
hen. gentleman quoted the Act, which specified that the
inquiry into the state of mind of the suspected lunatic pri-
soner was to be conducted by two justices of the county,
borough, or place where he was confined, assisted by two
medical men. The Act, therefore, he said, threw the re-
sponsibility upon the justices. II; is under this Act that
taie case of Townley had occurred—a ease which has pre-
excited a good deal of public interest, and with regard
to whicb. I feel it my duty to give the fullest explamution of
the whole of the circumstances which occurred. (Hear.)
It is well known that Townley was convicted of murder. 1
need not enter into the circumstances of the crime. It is
sufficient to say that he was tried for wilful murder, con-
victed, and sentenced by the judge. I may add that a plea
of insanity was set up on the trial; but that defence failed
and he was convicted and found guilty of wilful murder
The day after the trial the judge, Mr. Baron Martin, ad.
dressed this letter to me •

Nottingham, Dec. 13, 1563,

Sir,—George Victor Townley was convicted yesterday
before me, at Derby, of wilful murder, and sentenced to be
executed. I have directed a copy of my notes to be made
for you, if you should desire to have them ; but there is a
foil report of the trial in the newspapers. The conviction
was, in my opinion, right; but Dr. Forbes Winslow and

Dr. Gisborne, who was surgeon of the gaol, in whose care
the prisoner had been since his committal, were examined

at the trial, and both deposed in the strongest m ner that
the prisoner was of diseased mind, and absolu insane.
I think it right to call your attention atone to t. subject,
with a view to a correct opinion being form '0 as to the
propriety of his execution.

On receiving that letter, 1, after reading wit i attention the

evidence on the trial—including of course e evidence of

the two medical men to which the judge had thus pointedly

called my attention—l confess the evidence did not impress
me to the extent to which it had appeared to impress the
learned judge. But I felt that a judge who presides over
a trial of this kind, whose whole attention is fixed on the

evidence, and who sees the witnesses give their e7idence,
must be much more competent to form an 'opinion of the
weight which is due to such evidence than any other person
who merely reads a report of it. (Hear.) I wrote to him,
therefore, to say that it appeared to me that the evidence

was by no means conclusive as to the insanity of the pri-
soner, and that I wished to know from him whether he had

formed from the evidence he had heard given during the
trial, as well as from the demeanour of the prisoner—which
might b 3 an essential element of consideration—an cpinion
of his own as to the matter; whether he thotlght, in fact,
that the prisoner was insane, and whether he did not think
that inquiry should take place. I received from him, in
answer to that letter, a second letter, which I will read to
the house, It was directed to the Under-F.eoretary

Norwich, Dec. 13, 1863.
Sir,—l have received a letter, dated the 17th, requesting
me to inform Sir George Grey whether the impression pro-
duced on my mind by the evidence of the two medical wit-
nesses on the trial of Townley, coupled with the demeanour
of the prisoner, were such as to induce me to believe that
the prisoner is now insane ; if so, whether I think it neces-
sary to have any further inquiry. I cannot say that I have
formed any decided opinion on the point. The demeanour
of the prisoner afforded me no means of arriving at a con-
clusion. In fact, he sat on the trial with his head depressed,
so that I scarcely once saw his countenance, and he never
spoke. I should not be justified in saying that the evidence
of Dr. Forbes Winslow and Dr. Gisborne is not correct, for
I certainly think, and I have thought ever since the trial,
that there ought to be further inquiry. I enclose a copy of
my notes.

This is by no means the first case of a similar recommenda-
tion from a judge, after a trial has taken place in which a

prisoner has been convicted of murder. In some of these
cases the defence of insanity has been set up on the trial

and failed. In some it was not even made on the trial.

For a series of years cases have come under the notice of
myself and other Secretaries of State, by recommendations
of the judge or from other persons, who, if of sufficient

credit, have induced the Secretary of State to inquire into
the state of mind of the prisoner. In some cases the in-

quiry has gone back to the time of the commission of the
offence. I believe in most of these cases .the result was a

commutation of the capital sentence, and the temporary re-
moval of the prisoner to a lunatic asylum. The right hon.
gentleman quoted the case of Dallmore, who, under some-
what similar circumstances, had after being sentenced to
execution, been removed to Bethlehem, and after being
there found sane had been remitted to prison, and had the
capital sentence commuted to transportation for life, which
he is now undergoing. Ido not find the slightest fault
with Baron Martin for making his recommendation. Com-
ments made in some of the newspapers on the case seemed
to imply in some persons a total ignorance of what the law

of England really was as regarded the treatmeat
of criminals who became insane. Quoting Black-
stone and Sir John Hall (Solicitor-General in the
reign of William III.), to show what was the law in
this respect, the right lion, gentleman showed that it was
clearly and explicitly to the effect that if a prisoner was
found to be insane before trial he should not be put upon his
trial ; and that if found insane after trial, and before execu-

tion, that execution should be stayed. Such being our
humane and Christian law, Baron Martin had clearly no
other alternative than to make known to me the doubts
which he entertained of the sanity of the prisoner, and it
would have been, in fact, a gross violation of his bounden
duty if he had not done so. This being done, I could not
justify myself to Parliament and to my own consci,nce, and
to God, if, after the communication which
-1
had abstained from -nad been ad-
dressed to me by Mr. Baron Martiri,
ordering this inquiry. (13-eax, hear.) I felt that I had no
choice in the matter, and I determined to irstitute that in-
quiry. in co-,trauateatitig With the Under-Secretary on the
subie::‘, it occurred to me that the best persons to conduct
'.gat inquiry would be the Lunacy Commissioners, who are
entrneted with large powers by law to conduct such in-
quiries, and whose experience, therefore, is great, I re-
quested them, by a letter) to conduct that inquiry into the
actual state of mind of the prisoner, without any reference
to the opinions which had been expressed on the trial,
or to the proceedings since, and to inform me of the
present state of mind of the prisoner. I received their
report on the 29th of December, jest forty-eight hours
before the time fixed for the execution. That report was
not as clear and explicit as I hoped. It was a report
which did not distinctly answer the question which was
addressed to the Lunacy Commissioners. It stated that,
in their opinion, as far as they could collect from the evi-
dence they had obtained, no change had taken place in
the state of mind of the prisoner since the trial, or since
the commission of the offence. They stated further that
in their opinion they could not consider the prisoner to be
of sound mind ; but that, according to the law laid down
by Baron Martin, which is in accordance with the law col-
lectively laid down by the judges in the case of M'Naughton,
the prisoner was in a state responsible for his actions, and
was rightly convicted. Now I believe that the law as laid
down by the judges ought to prevail in criminal cases, and
if I had followed that report alone, I should not have felt
justified in stopping the due course of law, though it placed
me in the painful position of doing so after their statement
that they did not think him of sound mind ; yet according
to the law of the land, as laid down by the judges, he was
responsible for his acts. But at the same time I received
this report, I received by the same conveyance a certificate
purporting to be signed by three magistrates, and by two
medical men, a surgeon and a physician, certifying the in-
sanity of Townley. Under these circumstances it was
necessary to come to an immediate decision. It has been
said since that the certificate was invalid, two reasons being
given—the first, I am ashamed to say, that it was signed
on a Sunday ; and the other that the Act required that the
signing justices should be for the county where the case
was in the county part of the gaol. I feel bound to say that
if my attention had been called to these facts at the time
my decision would have been just the same. (Hear, hear.)
The hon. gentleman defended the course he had taken in
granting a respite, showing that he had not time to refer
the matter to the law officers of the Crown; for if he had
not signed the respite on that night it could not have ar-
rived in Derby until the night of the 30th, the execution
being fixed for the morning of the 31st ; and if an accident
had happened to a train or anything of that kind, it
might not have arrived until after the execution had
taken place. What I did was not to commute the
sentence, but to respite the execution. The next day a letter
was forwarded to me from the governor of the gaol, saying
that he had been requested to forward a certificate to me. It
was accompanied by no information that any irregularity
had been committed. Oa Dee. 30 I received a second cer-
tificate without any explanation ; and then, for the firs
time, doubts suggested themselves to my mind, because of
its being signed by county magistrates, the names of the
borough magistrates being omitted. Therefore, no sugges-
tion was made that that certificate was not perfectly formal;
and upon that certificate, and that a:one, the warrant of re-
moval was granted. If the warrant were founded upon the
first certificate, I could have understood that these doubts
with regard to that certificate might arise, although I believe
they had but little foundation. It might have been a ques-
tion before a court of law, whether the warrant was founded
upon a certificate which was not tecknically correct. But,
with regard to the respite no such question could arise, as
that was in the discretion of the Secretary of State. As to
the second certificate, the fast of its having bean signed by
four justices and two medical men, certifying in the terms
of the Act the insanity of Townley, evidently showed that
they had the Act before them ; and upon that secon certifi-
cate I issued the warrant for the removal of the prisoner
from Derby Gaol to Bethlehem Hospital. It was said I was
not bound to regard the second certificate, but to suffer the
man to be executed, But such a construction of the Act
is contrary to the uniform interpretation put upon it by
every Secretary of State who has held office, and I have
not been able to find a single exception since the time of
George IV. Let any man read the Act itself, and he
will see that it makes the certificate of two justices and
two medical men final and conclusive up to the point at
which the person so certified is removed to a lunatic
asylum, and until after such removal no new process can
be instituted for ascertaining whether such person is sane
or not. I felt bound, therefore, under these circumstances,
to issue a warrant for the removal of the prisoner, and con-
sequently, on the 11th of January, ho was received into a
lunatic asylum. I will not refer to the correspondence be-
tween myself and the magistrates of fierbyshire, because
the hon. member for the county (Mr. Mundy)—who, I
regret to say, is confined to his room in consequence of an
accident—has requested me to abstain from doing so until
he was present. I will only make this remark, that I felt
it my duty to call upon the magistrates who signed the
certificates, both borough and county, to ask for an expla•
nation of the course which they have taken. I have since
been asked why I did not call on the medical for men similar
eapianation. My answer is that I did not do so because, as
Secretary
of State, I had no right to apply to the medical
men for explanation; where as Secretary of State,l had an
authority to ask the magistrates for an explanation of acts
done in their magisterial capacity,
me on two points—first, that the. The magistrates
certificates
ue robona
on a satisfiedfide,
and only signed atter due inquiry and when theyas
insane,became
convinced in their own minds that' Townley w
however mistaken that conviction mighthave been;
secondly, that the machinery of the law put in motion by
the attorney for the prisoner, who had called on
the magistrates to act under this law and examine the ri-
sonr, and he also called in the medical men who wore to
take part in the inquiry, Ido not impute blame to the
attorney for tek:ng that course; as long as the
law allowed it, he had a right to do so. But, at
the same time, I think it is a serious defect in the law
which enables a prisoner, by his attorney or agent, to select
the magistrates or medical men who are to conduct an in-
quiry of that nature. (Hear.) At the same time I must
say that no blame is to be imputed to the magistrates for
the course they have taken under the existing law, one of
them having appeared not to be prepossessed in favour of