Glasgow Courier. — 1863-04-16 (Glasgow, Strathclyde, Scotland)

MRS WIACHLAN'S SECOND VICTIM.  For the brutal murder of Jessie M'Pherson in Mr Fleming's house at Sandyford, proved against Jessie M'Lachlan, that criminal was most righteously sentenced to death. To the crime of murder she added that of false witness, and by breach of the ninth COMmandment she succeeded in proouring from the blind mercies of the Home Office partial absolution from her penalty for the breach of the sixth. But her false witness was of the most detestable kind. Found red-handed, the prints of her naked foot tamped in the blood of her victim, afterwards selling, the stolen plate for her own use, seeking to dye and alter and take to herself her victim's clothes, carrying her own clothes dabbled in blood by railway to A distant field, there tearing them and sea ttering them abroad, exculpating herself when accusst by three successive sets iif minutely circumstantial lies, and not daring when on her trial to play the last card in her hand in a fourth set of lies, also .nintite and circumstantial that could be on the trial peaty met and confuted, this woman was declared :runty on the clearest evidence. It was only after judgment pronounced that her advocate produced ,0 court her last and most infamous set of excuses, in which she sought to save herself by casting the 'oad of her own infamy upon an innocent old man. If the contents of that paper were true, it contained the woman's only just defence, and would have , been produced upon her trial and substantiated. It would not bear open judicial sifting, and was therefore produced after the verdict, for the purpose of creating a diversion in the prisoner's favour among weakminded people out of doors, and giving a handle for appeals to the Home Office. And the Home Office actually admitted an appeal founded upon this pretended confession, one (if a series of contradictory confessions, that in some parts refuted itself, and that was rightly characterised by the Judge, with all the public evidence before him, as infamous. The Home Office listened to the appeal, and undertook, in the secret way customary to it when it acts as a private criminal Court of Cassation, to inquire into the lie. The result of the inquiry was an unexplained commutation of the sentence of the murderess from death to imprisonment for life. This is assumed by more than half Glasgow, and by all professional philanthropists, to be justification of the calumny with which a wretched woman sought, through a fresh victim, to escape from the last penalty of murder. By help of Sir George Grey, who is virtually her accomplice in this dark work if he do not publish all the evidence that justified his interference with the courts of law, Jessie M 'Lachlan has lied herself out of the hangman's noose and an innocent man into infamy. Mr Stirling will on Friday week bring this matter before the House of Commons. No British subject ever suffered greater cruelty at the hands of despotic foreigners than old Mr Fleming has suffered at the hands of the Home Office if there was no ground for the commutation of M'Lachlan's sentence. If there was found any fresh ground of suspicion against him, he has a right to know what it was, that it may be openly established against him, or that he may not be denied the opportunity of clearing himself, as we are sure he can. He and his family have courted and prayed for full and open investigation. The old man has been stabbed in the dark with consent of Government. When it is a mere question of injudicious or judicious mercy to an individual offender the Home Office may act unchallenged upon private information. Here there is not only a dealing at discretion with the guilty, there has been imputation cast upon the innocent. We cannot doubt that Mr Stirling will be supported on Friday in his endeavour to procure fair English justice for the Fleming family in this most wretched case. What witnesses did Mr Young examine? What care did he take to teat their evidence? We see in the April number of the Glasgow Medical Journal a minute and very able recital by Dr Macleod of his medical evidence. Was Dr Macleod examined by Mr Young? and if so, what rebutted evidence like his ?—.Examiner.