The Sun. — 1863-04-13 (London, England)

EXAMINER.—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 procuring from the blind mercies of the Home Office partial absolution from her penalty for breach of the sixth. But her false witness was of the most detestable kind. Found red-handed, the prints of her naked foot stamped in the blood of her victim, afterwards selling the 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 scattering them abroad, exculpating herself when accused by three successive sets of 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 minute and circumstantial, that could be on the trial openly met and confuted, this woman was declared guilty on the clearest evidence. It was only after judgment pronounced, that her advocate produced in court her last and most infamous set of excuses, in which she sought to save herself by casting the load 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 weak-minded 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 of a series of contradictory confessions, that in some part 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 cessation, 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 sdught, 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 course of' law, Jessie M'Lachlan has lied herself out of the hangman's noose and an innocent man into infamy. Mr. Stirling will next Friday 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'Lauchlan'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 the Government. When it is a mere question of injudicious or judicious mercy to an individual offender, the Home-office may act unchallenged on 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.