Two centuries ago today, a burglar named Philip Street hanged at London’s Newgate Gaol.

Though his were merely property crimes — which were still capital offenses at the time — Street was such a prolific burglar that the Old Bailey, faced with a stack of seven victims ready to pursue their cases against him, got a death sentence, and then a second for insurance, and paid the remaining five prosecutors to go away.

Street did enjoy some measure of representation: the barrister John Adolphus — whose subsequent representation of the likes of the Cato Street conspirators, John Thurtell and Benjamin Courvoisier all speak better to his prominence than his acumen — mounted the less than compelling technical objection that the court’s documents identified Street’s victim the Earl of Rosebery “as an Esquire, and commonly called a Lord, because in reality he was a Peer of the Realm, and therefore non constat that he an Esquire; and thefore the prisoner could not be convicted on such an indictment” — just the sort of lame cavil that would lead John Stuart Mill to lament in 1820 that “not one-half only but three-fourths at least of [a lawyer’s] business is deception.”

On this day..

• 2000: Qader Aktar Hassan, Anis Qassem Dahnassi and Fatima Yussef al-Din Sayed
• 1884: Seven anarchists of La Mano Negra
• 1797: Thomas Starr, penknife murderer
• Feast Day of Rufinus and Valerius
• 1662: Sir Henry Vane, Commonwealth parliamentarian
• 1972: Sanong Phobang, Thanoochai Montriwat, and Jumnian Jantra
• 1897: Choka Ebin, by his own relatives
• 2001: Jay Scott, trend-setter
• 1381: Simon of Sudbury and Robert Hales during Wat Tyler's peasant rebellion
• 1441: Corrado Trinci, Lord of Foligno
• 2008: Anandrao Sainu Koram, Naxalite informer
• 1856: Dr. William Palmer, the Rugeley Poisoner