§ MR. ADAMS, in rising to ask for leave to introduce a Bill to enable Coroners in England and Wales to admit to Bail persons charged with manslaughter, said, he 733 desired to remedy what was considered to be a great grievance connected with the administration of public justice. The Coroners' juries were quite incompetent to decide what was manslaughter and what was not. It often required great discrimination to draw the line, and it was a very common thing to hear Judges at assizes tell the grand jury that the evidence against persons committed on Coroners' inquisitions was not sufficient to support the charges on which they had been committed. But at present, after the verdict had been found, Coroners had no power to admit to bail persons charged with man slaughter; and, consequently, persons were sometimes detained for five or six months in prison, waiting for the assize, who were immediately acquitted upon their trials, or only sentenced to very light punishment. A poor man, committed under a Coroner's warrant, not having the means of applying to a Judge in London, must lie in prison, and even in the ease of those of better means, there was some imprisonment and some expense. An act of manslaughter might be committed by some slight act of negligence; as in a recent case, where a man employed in a mine omitted to place properly a stage, and consequently a truck fell into the mine and unhappily killed a man passing underneath. There was no intention in that case, and it was impossible for any man not a lawyer to say whether the negligence amounted to man slaughter. In another case of a different kind, where an epidemic prevailed in a village remote from medical aid, the clergy man of the parish provided himself with powders prescribed for the disease by a book of competent authority. One of those powders was given to a child of weak frame, who subsequently died. Upon an inquest the medical men admitted that in all probability the child would in any case have died from the disease; but one of them said he thought the death had been hastened by the administration of the powder to a child of delicate frame. The jury returned a verdict of "Manslaughter," and the Coroner was obliged to commit the clergy man to gaol, where he had to remain until an application could be made to a Judge in London for his admission to bail. When the case came on at the assizes the Judge said it was impossible to say that this act amounted to manslaughter, and the grand jury at once ignored the Bill. Now, under those circumstances, there could, he thought, be no reasonable objection to the 734 introduction of the measure which he proposed, and he should therefore simply add that it contained no provision dealing with the somewhat complicated subject of Coroners' fees, on which a Committee was then sitting, or the question of whether magistrates were in the habit or not of interfering to so great an extent with those officers in the discharge of their duties.
§ Motion agreed to.
§ Bill to enable Coroners in England and Wales to admit to Bail persons charged with the offence of Manslaughter, ordered to be brought in by Mr. ADAMS, Mr. SMITH CHILD, and Mr. GARD.
§ Bill presented, and read 1o.