The Sun. — 1862-11-15 (London, England)

JESSIE APLACIILAN—now that the evidence brought forward on both sides has been thoroughly sifted throughout—the testimony of all the witnesses carefully examined, and scrupulously cross-examined in open court, fixed the guilt of the Glasgow Murder (a murder of peculiar atrocity) fixed the guilt of that frightful murder to all but a dead certainty. Again and again she (the accused) was found during the trial to have deliberately perjured herself. She was found to be in possession of the clothes of the deceased. Her own garments were discovered torn to shreds, and saturated With blood, hid away in a hedge far from  the scene of this brutal assassination. She was proved to have pawned under an assumed name the plate which was missing from the house in which the victim's dead body lay, and from which dwelling-house the missing plate had been purloined at thebav itni time d,j ea asserted, thertefra si instance, that LatACul; LOn A l'i the night assassination. the fi t nsEtn night of the murder she slept in her own bed, in her he own room, at some distance from Sandyford-place— was shown by the evidence of more than one reliable witness to have not done anything of the kind, but, on the contrary, to have been mysteriously absent from her lodgings during the whole of that very night upon which the murder of her intimate friend was perpetrated. Yet this is the miserable criminal, the justly pronounced sentence of death upon whom has been shamefully commuted into a sentence of penal servitude for life! How— under which unwonted circumstances—we all know but too well ! After a secret investigation into the case before an unauthoritative tribunal—and in defiance of two noteworthy facts, that ought, both of them, in reason to have been taken very seriously into consideration. Firstly, the fact that the verdict of the jury—of a cautious Scotch jury—was simply, bluntly, and without any reservation or modification whatever, one of Guilty ! Not a whisper being heard from the jury-box recommending the prisoner upon any,even the feeblest, plea to mercy. That was the first circumstance attendant upon the close of the four days' trial of JESSIE M'LACHLAN that ought to have commanded from the Home Secretary the most serious consideration before the right hon. baronet ventured to interfere with the verdict delivered by those twelve cautious and conscientious jurymen! As we have said, however, there is yet another fact noticeable at the termination of this public trial at Glasgow sufficient of itself, one might have imagined, to deter any Home Secretary from acting rashly in setting aside as valueless or :erroneous the Verdict of Guilty delivered against the prisoner by the jury, and the Sentence of Death pronounced upon her by the Judge. This second and especially notable circumstance being the unusual emphasis with which that learned judge prefaced his formal sentence of the criminal to undergo the last penalty of the law—avowing hie own absolute and complete belief that the wretched woman before him was guilty of the crime of which she had been accused, of which she had, after a patient and prolonged investigation there in open court, a trial presided over by himself, been convicted! In flagrant defiance of all which, the Home Secretary has swept aside all considerations of this kind! And aided by a hocuspocus in a back parlour, before two or three ex-official examiners—as judicial authorities unrecognisable in any way whatever by the law of the land—Sir GEORGE GREY has commuted the sentence of death pronounced upon JESSIE NPLACULAN, and has himself sentenced her, during the rest of her natural, or, in one sense, one might almost call it, unnatural life, to penal servitude ! It is an illogical decision—a wholly inconsequential commutation. Yet scarcely has the Right Hon. the Home Secretary acted thus by JESSIE XPLACHLAN than he hesitates to interpose in any way beween SAMUEL GARDNER and his fate! This miserable prisoner—now under sentence of death in the condemned cell at Newgate—unlike