The Blackburn Child-Murder Case
| Author | C. G. Looms |
| Date | 01 January 1950 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X5002300105 |
| Published date | 01 January 1950 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
THE
BLACKBURN
CHILD-MURDER
CASE 25
safeguards for the protection of the citizen to vanish and of offering a
positive inducement to the authorities to use irregular methods.
It
was obvious, Lord Cooper continued, that excessively rigid rules
as to the exclusion of evidence might operate to the detriment, not to
the advantage, of an accused and might even lead to the conviction of
the innocent ;
and
extreme cases could be figured in which the exclusion
of a vital piece of evidence from the knowledge of the
jury
because of
some technical flaw in the conduct of the Police would be an outrage
upon common sense and a defiance of elementary justice. An irregu-
larity in the obtaining of evidence did not necessarily make that evidence
inadmissible.
To
apply the law to the case under review, his Lordship concluded,
was not easy.
The
case was relatively trivial and singularly unsuitable
as a ' test case.'
The
inspectors who exceeded their authority were
not police officers enjoying a large residium of common law powers
but
the employees of a company acting in association with the Milk
Marketing Board, whose only powers were derived from contracts
between the Board and certain milk
producers-of
whom the appellant
was not one. What tilted the balance against the prosecution was
that
persons in the special position of these inspectors ought to know the
precise limits of their authority and should be held to exceed these
limits at their peril.
It
was held
that
the inspectors acted in good faith
but
it was incontrovertible that they obtained assent to the search by
amisrepresentation.
In
the court's view, the evidence should
not
have been admitted and the conviction secured on it could not stand.
The
Blackburn
Child-Murder
Case
By C. G.
LOOMS
Chief
Constable,
Blackburn
County
Borough
Police
FOREWORD
NOW that the Queen's Park Hospital
murder
has been solved, and
the murderer dealt with according to law, it is felt that the facts
of the crime, the wide scope of the enquiries and the volume of finger-
prints taken, justify the case being written up, not merely for information
of the crime itself
but
for the valuable lessons to be learned from it.
The
crime itself was of the most bestial and brutal kind, and shocked the
whole country.
Of
all places where one could feasibly imagine a child would be
safe it would be in the Children's Ward of a hospital, and the fact that
this four-year-old girl was snatched from her cot in the Children's Ward,
raped and then brutally battered to death, not only aroused indignation
To continue reading
Request your trial