They were often rushed and with such poor forensic evidence available there must have been many wrong verdicts.
Class differences often made differences in attitudes to the accused.
Women who committed adultery were often judged on that rather than the actual alleged offence and by men who were adulterous themselves !
As late as the early fifties a wrong verdict of Murder was passed on Timothy Evans for the murder of his wife , some years later John Reginald Halliday Christie was found guilty, too late for Evans who had been hanged.
The preface to Dickens達arnaby Rudge gives an account of an actual execution .
The case of Mary Jones.,1777 .
She was a young ( 19) mother with a very young baby and a toddler.
Her husband had been press ganged .
She ran up a few debts so what few goods she had were taken as payment and she was turned out of her home. She had to beg for food on the streets .
She was arrested for stealing and sentenced to death ,notwithstanding she had her baby with her on the public scaffold ,breast feeding it.
Hanged in public as an example 覧覧-
She was of good reputation until that incident, and given her husband had been forcibly drafted into the army she had been left destitute.
To satisfy the shopkeepers of Ludgate she was hanged as an example 覧- presumably to the many other young mothers whose husbands had also been press ganged against their will, into the army thus leaving many more women in the same awful predicament.
She was hanged in public at Tyburn.
That used to really upset me,well still does.
Press Ganging was a dreadful thing ,leaving families destitute,no Army pay sent home to their families .
Rant over覧-
Viktoria.
