Notes on Recent Crime
| Published date | 01 October 1932 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X3200500402 |
| Date | 01 October 1932 |
| Subject Matter | Notes on Recent Crime |
Notes
on Recent Crime
PUBLI C attention has been fixed, a little morbidly from
some points of view,
but
also with a genuine logical
interest in the question of guilt or innocence, on the trial of
Mrs. Barney, an unhappily married society woman, accused
before Humphreys J. at the Old Bailey of murdering her lover,
, Michael ' Stephen, in the early hours of the morning at her
flat in a Kensington Mews. She was acquitted both of murder
and manslaughter after a powerful speech by her counsel,
Sir Patrick Hastings, which the experienced Judge described
as one of the finest he had ever heard in a Court of Law.
The
speech, like the silences of a great actor, was powerful
for what it did not say. While the undercurrent was emotional
appeal, in appearance it was a severely logical analysis of the
evidence and nothing but the evidence.
It
was the exact anti-
thesis of the florid style of Marshall Hall.
The
contrast was
marked, too, in the cross-examination, not a question being
asked which was not strictly necessary, no long wordy duels
being indulged in with Crown experts. Foolish things have
been said after this caseof one law for the rich and one for the
poor. Not everyone can brief Sir Patrick Hastings,
but
no
one who followed the case closely can doubt that there was
nothing definite in the known facts to contradict Mrs. Barney's
story, told at once and retold on oath at the trial without
variation, of an accident.
The
prosecution had not therefore
discharged the onus of proof. A number of small details,
such as the lack of finger-prints on the revolver, the gross
exaggeration and inaccuracy of the witnesses from the Mews,
bruises found on Mrs. Barney, tended to show that her story
was true, or might be true. Mrs. Barney was subsequently
fined £50 at the Police Court for keeping a revolver without
a licence, and she may consider herself lucky perhaps that she
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