When a verdict of guilty of wilful murder is returned, a Judge, whatever may be his opinion of its propriety or justice, has no alternative but to deliver the sentence of death, and in the very words the law prescribes.  It is not his judgment or decision, but it is so decreed that the sentence shall in no way depend upon the sympathy or opinion of the Judge.  Whatever mitigating circumstances there may be must be considered by the Secretary of State for the Home Department as representing the Sovereign, and upon his advice alone the Sovereign acts.

But the Home Secretary never allows a sentence of death to be executed without the fullest possible inquiry as to mitigating circumstances, and it is at this stage that the opinion of the Judge is almost all-powerful.

My judgment in this case was the result of much anxious thought and consideration.  The responsibility cast upon me was great.  The case was as difficult as it was serious; but my line of duty was plain, and it was to leave the facts as clearly as I could possibly state them, with such explanation of the law applicable to each case as my ability would allow, and then leave the jury to find according to their honest belief.  No duty more arduous has ever since been imposed upon me, and I performed it in my honest conscience, without swerving from what I believed, and believe still, to be my strict line of duty.

I have had many opportunities of reconsidering the whole circumstances, but I have never changed or varied my opinion after all these years, and am certain I never shall—­namely, that I did my duty according to the best of my judgment and ability.

A Judge may go wrong in many ways, and often does in one way or other, especially if he does not know his own mind—­the worst of all weaknesses, because it usually leads to an attempt to strike a medium line between innocence and guilt.

One great weakness, too, in a Judge is not having the faculty of setting out the facts in language which is intelligible to the jury, or in not setting them out at all, but repeating them so often and in so many forms that they are at last left in an absolutely hopeless muddle.  A Judge once kept on so at the jury about “if you find burglarious intent, and if you don’t find burglarious intent,” that at last the jury found nothing except a verdict of not guilty, giving the “benefit of the doubt as to what the Judge meant.”

As an illustration of the necessity of giving the jury a clear idea of the evidence in the simplest case, I will state what took place at Exeter.  Juries are unused to evidence, and have very often to be told what is the bearing of it.  In a case of fowl-stealing which I was trying, there was a curious defence raised, which seemed too ridiculous to notice.  It was that the fowls had crept into the nose-bag in which they had been found, and which was in the prisoner’s possession, in order to shelter themselves from the east wind.