The Sun. — 1869-03-09 (London, England)

EXECUTION AT CONSTANTIONPLE.  Another of these locally rare sacrifices to justice occurrea on Wednesday morning in a street near Ak-Serai. The victim in this case was a Mussulman Albanian, named Hassan, who about a fortnight ago violated and then murdered a woman at Scutari. He had entered the house, in a lonely quarter of the Asiatic suburb, in the daytime, and, finding the woman alone, perpetrated his double crime, and afterwards decamped with what light valuables he could carry off. The police, for a wonder, succeeded in tracking him, and, as he was identified by some one who had seen him enter the house, he finally confessed the crime during his second or third examination at the Zaptieh. From the first there was no chance of his escaping capital punishment, but his sentence was, as usual, concealed from him till the last. The execution had been delayed for some days owing to the difficulty of finding a gipsy—the usual finisher of the law in Stamboul—to undertake the job for the modest fee offered by the authorities. The Zingaree, however, holding out for better pay, a policeman was at length induced to do the work, and, without previous hint of his fate, the murderer was roused from his sleep at sunrise on Wednesday to go down, as he was told, to a steamer for exile to Trebizonde. On reaching the spot selected, the party of police escorting him halted, and the first intimation the wretch had of his fate was the question if he desired to say his prayers. He replied in a negative. and the executioner then advanced and attempted to throw a looped cord over his head. Manacled though he was, he resisted for some minutes, struggling fiercely, and screaming in a manner which, early as the hour was, speedily gathered a crowd into the previously empty street. At length the cord was got round his neck, and, after a further short resistance, he was strangled into insensibility. This done, the body was hitched up to a hook in the door-post of a neighbouring butcher's shop, with the feet barely off the ground, and left to die out thus, under watch of a single zaptieh. As usual, there was no excitement among the spectators, and in less than half an hour after the murderer was dead only some three or four loiterers lingered near the spot. About 1 p.m. the body was cut down, and carried off in a sack for burial.—Levant Herald, Jan. 24.  Mr. Hatton Hamer Stansfeld, who for many years filled the office of official assignee in the court of the late Mr. Commissioner Fonblanque, and who for some years has acted as provisional assignee in the winding up of old insolvency cases, has been appointed to fill the vacancy in the post of official assignee in Mr. Commissioner Holroyd's court, vacant by the dismissal of Mr. Edwards.  At the Derby Assizes Mr. Hugh Brookes surrendered to answer a charge of "practising intimidation, on the 13th of July, 1868," upon George Thornley, a voter for the southern division of the county of Derby, by means of a threatening letter, in order to induce him to give his vote. After a long inquiry, his lordship expressed his opinion that the indictment had not been maintained, and a verdict was returned for the defendant. Mr. Shirley Brooks, in writing in the Illustrated London News, says: " Good Friday has been selected by certain Reformers of the less-considered sort for a procession in honour of the late Ernest Jones. One reads that some kinds of hymns are to be sung, and that a meeting is to take place in Trafalgar-square. I suppose that it is of no use to ask such persons to reconsider their intention ; but could Ernest Jones have foreseen anything of the kind, he would have declared it, both in regard to the choice of the day and the ridiculous ceremonial, detestable. Mr. Ernest Jones was a gentleman."