1678: Stephen Arrowsmith
4 comments December 16th, 2012 Meaghan
(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)
On this day in 1678, one Stephen or Steven Arrowsmith was executed at Tyburn for the rape of a little girl the previous summer.
He was one of six people sentenced to hang that day, but four of them got reprieved. Arrowsmith and Nathaniel Russel, a convicted murderer, were the ones who had to swing.
The victim in Arrowsmith’s case, eight-year-old Elizabeth Hopkins, testified against her rapist in court, as did the child who walked in and saw Arrowsmith abusing the victim on July 7 of that year. Neither witness was properly sworn in. From the Old Bailey records:
The Girl that was ravished, being between 8 and 9, testified that he had had to do with her for half a year together every sunday, that she was hindred from crying the first time, by his stopping her mouth, and that he gave her money afterwards; and she never discovered it, till some of her friends observing her to go as if she were very sore, examined her, and by telling her she would be in danger of hanging in Hell, got her to confess, that the Prisoner was her fathers Prentice.
One Mrs. Cowel did testifie that upon observing her going, and other Circumstances, she did resolve to examine her, and made her confess, which she did, and being searched, was found shamefully abused, and sent to the Doctors to cure.
The like was attested by one Mrs. Sherwin, and by a Midwife, who said, she had got a very foul disease by it.
Arrowsmith’s defense was two-pronged:
-
he hadn’t done it
but if he had done it, Elizabeth had consented
The maid of the doctor who examined Elizabeth testified for the defense, saying she’d asked the victim why she hadn’t told anyone about the abuse, and Elizabeth answered that she took pleasure in it.
The jury was very reluctant to convict and, in fact, initially brought back a verdict of not guilty. And here the judge, a fellow with the Dickensian name Lord Chief Justice Scroggs,* decided to become the prosecutor.
He had had already expressed his own “great Detestation and abhorrence of so Horrid and Vile an offense,” and demanded to know why the jury had acquitted Arrowsmith.
One of the jurors, an apothecary, ventured that he personally believed Elizabeth had consented to intercourse. Scroggs reminded this person that she was under age and so the issue of her consent was irrelevant.
Other jury members said they were bothered by the fact that almost all the evidence was hearsay and the only direct witnesses, Elizabeth and her friend, had not been sworn. Testily, the judge replied that a rapist was not going to commit his crime in crowd of eyewitnesses, and the only reason the two girls had not been sworn was because of their youth, but if the jury wanted them sworn in he was prepared to do that. Then he sent them back to re-think their verdict.
To further complicate matters, during the second round of deliberations a thoughtless officer of the court, charged with looking after the two child witnesses, brought both girls to the jury to talk to them in private. When Scroggs found out he quickly put a stop to this and had the bailiff thrown in jail, and the jury (who swore that this hadn’t been their idea) was allowed to continue its deliberations. Jurors later said the unauthorized meeting had convinced them of the girls’ honesty, and they returned with a verdict of guilty.
Kind of like Twelve Angry Men in reverse.
“The Criminal Trial Before the Lawyers,” (pdf) a paper published in the University of Chicago Law Review in 1978, referenced the Arrowsmith case and Scroggs’s behavior. The paper’s author, John H. Langbein, tried to explain and defend the “judicial dominance” which might lead a modern reader to look askance at the fairness of the proceeding:
Hale’s treatise confirms this practice. “If the jurors by mistake or partiality give their verdict in court, yet they may rectify their verdict before it is recorded, or by advice of the court go together again and consider better of it, and alter what they have been delivered.” The tradition that the jury would lightly disclose the reasoning for a verdict became especially important in this situation, because it enabled the court to probe the basis of the profferred verdict, hence to identify the jury’s “mistake” and correct it. Thus, in the Arrowsmith case, the court discovered that the chemist’s opinion that an eight-year-old “could not be Ravished” had been influential, and the court refuted it…
Indeed, to this day in many countries, including the UK and the USA, a judge still has the right to overturn a jury’s decision if he or she feels the evidence did not support the verdict. This privilege is but rarely exercised.
At the gallows, just before his death, Arrowsmith wept and finally owned up to what he had done, saying he’d been a good person all his life until “Satan seduced him to this abominable wickedness.”
* Seen here in a more everyday juridical situation, Scroggs was also a figure in the “Popish Plot” anti-Catholic trials breaking out at this period.
On this day..
- 1709: Thomas Smith, Aaron Jones, Joseph Wells, and John Long - 2019
- 2010: John David Duty, the first pentobarbital execution in the U.S. - 2018
- 1859: Four of John Brown's Raiders - 2017
- 1946: Sulaiman Murshid, Alawite prophet - 2016
- 1897: John Morgan, the last public hanging in West Virginia - 2015
- 1937: Titsian Tabidze, poet - 2014
- 1794: Jean-Baptiste Carrier, of the Noyades de Nantes - 2013
- Themed Set: Tyburn on the cusp of the Bloody Code - 2012
- 1949: Traycho Kostov, Bulgarian purgee - 2011
- 1952: Lennie Jackson and Steve Suchan, of the Boyd Gang - 2010
- 1520: Hemming Gadh - 2009
- 1943: Elfriede Scholz, Erich Maria Remarque's sister - 2008
- 1594: Alison Balfour - 2007
Entry Filed under: 17th Century,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,England,Execution,Guest Writers,Hanged,History,Notable Jurisprudence,Other Voices,Public Executions,Rape,Sex,Wrongful Executions
Tags: 1670s, 1678, december 16, london, nathaniel russel, stephen arrowsmith, steven arrowsmith, Tyburn, william scroggs
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