QUESTION. (Hansard, 10 July 1860)

SIR GEORGE LEWIS

said, in answer to the question of the noble Lord, he would read a statement which had been furnished to him by the Marquess of Salisbury, Chairman of the Quarter Sessions, at which the prisoner in question was tried:— The case of the convict Williams is as follows. He is a common tramp, without any home. He came out of an Essex gaol—I believe Chelmsford—into Hertfordshire, immediately committed some robbery, of which he was summarily convicted, and for which he was imprisoned, I think, for six weeks. At the expiration of his sentence he was dismissed from gaol with the usual allowance, and, his boots being in a bad state, they were repaired. He went to a lodginghouse at Ware (two miles only from Hertford), and the same evening at dusk 1664 he rang the bell at a shoemaker's shop, and, having ascertained by this means that no one was in the shop he went in and stole a pair of boots. The shopkeeper went to the door, but, finding nobody, thought the bell had been rung out of mischief. The next day Williams was detected in some other robbery by a policeman. He was taken to the gaol at Hertford. The warder who examined him on his entrance observed that the boots he had on were new, and not the same as those with which he had been dismissed from the gaol. From the shuffling answer he gave an inquiry was made, and the owner was found. The boots were identified by the shopman as having been in the shop on the preceding evening. Some other corroborative evidence was adduced at the trial before me at Easter Quarter Sessions, with which I need not trouble you, and Williams was found Guilty. There was a second indictment for the robbery which led to his apprehension. Both were handed up to me as true bills. I cannot say why I selected the robbery detailed for trial. I took no note of the other, but can of course procure it, as well as an accurate statement of the prisoner's history previously to the robbery for which he was tried before me. I sentenced him to three months' imprisonment and a private whipping. I submit that if ever there was a case in which whipping was a desirable punishment it was the present. The man evidently lived upon plunder. A gaol was no punishment to him, and I could not have sentenced him to the severe penalty of penal servitude without trying him for the second robbery. To show the House that the sentence was perfectly legal, the third section of the 7 & 8 Geo. IV., c. 29 (Sir Robert Peel's Consolidating Act for larceny), gave the Court of Quarter Sessions full power to inflict that sentence. It was a perfectly legal sentence, and it appeared to him that if whipping was to be ever inflicted by sentence of Quarter Sessions on an indictment which gave the opportunity of defence by counsel, and with all the solemnities of justice, the present was a most proper case in which it should take place.