316
"I can't understand all this fuss about using electricity for executions," remarked Judge Lynch of Kansas, reflectively. " Out in our section we have used the telegraph-pole for years."
Attorney. My dear madam, I find that your estate is heavily encumbered. You will have enough lo live upon, but you must husband your resources. Widow. Well, my daughter Mary is my only resource now. Attorney. Exactly; husband her as soon as possible. A witness was being examined at a trial of an action for the price of goods which were alleged by the defendant to have been returned as not up to sample. "Did you see the defendant return the oats?" "Yes, your Honor." "On what ground did he refuse to accept them?" "In the back yard, your Honor."
NOTES. In the Spectator a writer says : " Affairs of consequence having brought me to town, I had the curiosity the other day to visit Westminster Hall, and having placed myself in one of the courts, expected to be most agreeably enter tained. After the court and counsel were with due ceremony seated, up stands a learned gen tleman and began : " When this matter was last stirred before your lordship; the next humbly moved to quash an indictment; another com plained that his adversary had snapped a judg ment; the next informed the court that his client was stripped of his possessions; another begged leave to acquaint their lordships that they had been saddled with costs. At last up got a grave serjeant, and told us his client had been hungup a whole term by a writ of error. At this I could stand it no longer, but came hither and resolved to apply myself to your Honor to interpose with these gentlemen, that they would leave off such low and unnatural expressions; for surely, though the lawyers subscribe to hideous French
and false Latin, yet they should let their clients have a little decent and proper English for their money." Mr. Clair James Grece, LL.D., solicitor of Redhill, Surrey, asks to be permitted to point out what might possibly be overlooked, that on September 3 was accomplished the seventh cen tury of what is still known to lawyers as the term of legal memory. This, as is well known, dates from the commencement of the reign of Richard I.; but as reigns were then deemed to begin not at the demise of the last sovereign, but with the coronation of his successor, Sept.3, 1189, or seven hundred years ago on Sep tember 3 last, when the crown was placed on the brow of the Lion-Hearted Monarch at West minster, marks the exact epoch from which legal memory is computed. — Law Journal (London). A reporter of one of the Paris papers has had an interview with M. Beauquesne, director of the Roquette prison, where criminals con demned to death are confined. "I am a partisan of the death-penalty," said M. Beauquesne; " but the application of that penalty such as it exists seems to me sufficient, and it is needless to aggravate it. Let me ex plain. Capital punishment by the guillotine is carried out pretty rapidly. From the moment when I go into the cell of a condemned man to announce to him that his application for a writ of error has been rejected, and to exhort him to have courage up to the time when the fatal in stant arrives, it seldom takes more than ten minutes or a quarter of an hour. Now I am thoroughly convinced from reading the descrip tion of the American system of death by elec tricity that this lapse of time must be exceeded. The preparations are necessarily longer and more minute. The patient must be present at them, since the attendants must place him in the fatal chair, bind him, and stretch his legs. That seems to me an aggravation not foreseen by the law. And think of the horrible scenes of re sistance that must inevitably occur often! The culprit will struggle. He will not consent to be seated upon the chair of death, and he will be all the stronger because his hands and feet are free until he is in position. Then the execu tioner and his aids must grapple with him,
