Stamford Mercury
Crown Court
Before Mr. Justice Gastelee.
The Judge, after congratulating the Grand Jury on the smallness of the calendar, begged to solicit their attention to two or three cases which particularly demanded their consideration.—Two cases of alleged rape, one upon the person of an adult person, and the other upon a child years age, would demand a particular portion of attention, especially as it was very easy to make a charge in such cases, and very difficult matter to disprove it, especially as a very material alteration in the law had taken place during the last few years, by which the proof of the offence was rendered more easy, and the evidence against the prisoner of course became more open to suspicion. He begged them to discriminate between the places in which violence had been used; as there might be situations in which a prisoner, taking advantage the time and place, and notwithstanding the cries and resistance of the person, obtain his object,—and there might be others in which, notwithstanding the opportunities of escaping, the parties might, after consenting, have brought the charge from religious motives*
Rape at Langtoft.
John Pickering, aged 56, laborer, of Langtoft, was charged with committing rape on the person of Ann Roberts, of the same place, a child about 6 years old, on the 22nd of April last. The Judge said he had read the depositions, and it did not appear to him that there was sufficient evidence to convict the prisoner of the capital offence. His Lordship then examined the mind of the child, and although she repeated the Lord's prayer by rote, it was evidently without any appearance of thinking about what she was saying; and it also seemed that she had never received any instruction in the principles of the christian religion. The clergyman of the parish in which she had resided, his Lordship observed, should be requested to attend to her, and to instruct her to distinguish between good and evil: the trial would therefore stand over till the next assizes, the prisoner being in the mean time liberated on bail.
