The law on its trial or, personal recollections of the death penalty and its opponents / by Alfred H. Dymond.

  • Dymond, Alfred H. (Alfred Hutchinson), 1827-1903.
Date:
1865
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The law on its trial or, personal recollections of the death penalty and its opponents / by Alfred H. Dymond. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    suspicions were aroused, and, a search being made, the jewellery was missed. The police were summoned, and, entering the house where she had taken shelter, found her- still sitting weeping with the jewellery upon her. But her story availed nothing, and, like hundreds of others, her life was sacrificed at the shrine of the demon of slaughter. I do not remember any circumstance in Barry's career that more thoroughly roused his indignation than the attempt of the Whig Government in 1832 to revive the barbarous custom of gibbeting criminals. It was effected by the insertion of a clause in the ^' Anatomy Bill. By that clause, the law which made dissection of the bodies of murderers a part of their peculiar punishment was abolished, and a provision substituted, by which the bodies of all prisoners convicted of murder, should either be hung in chains, or buried under the gallows on which they had been executed, or within the precincts of the prison in which such prisoner had been confined, according to the discretion of the court before whom the prisoner might be tried. Two experiments were made to test the public feeling with respect to this disgusting practice. At Leicester, a man named Cook had committed a savage murder; and a similar offence, with