Analogia by George Dyson

Author:George Dyson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

* * *

The trial was held on November 27, 1882, in New Westminster before Judge Henry P. P. Crease, a friend of Hall’s for more than twenty years who explained to the jury that “if I had known that John Hall would be here for trial, I assure you I would not have presided here today.”23 Crease, who had immigrated to Vancouver Island from England in 1858, “administered the law with a strong but temperate hand, often in the wildest and most distant parts of the province,” and, after being gravely injured on circuit in northern British Columbia, owed his life to his First Nations companions who carried him to safety “down the steep trails not ‘feet foremost like a dead man,’ as he said, ‘but head foremost,’ by which means he persuaded them to bring him out.”24

Hall’s life was in the jury’s hands. The Crown was represented by W. J. MacElmen, while the defendant was represented by William Norman Bole, a fellow Irishman who in 1877 had been on his way to Australia but missed his ship in San Francisco and took passage to Victoria, British Columbia, instead. He became the first barrister to practice in New Westminster, earning a reputation as a formidable defense lawyer before becoming queen’s counsel in 1887 and a county judge of the supreme court in 1889, where he acquired the nickname “Lightning Justice” Bole. He defended a number of high-profile murder cases, including James “Scotty” Halliday, accused of the murder of Thomas Poole and his two children in 1879, who was acquitted, despite much incriminating evidence, after a trial lasting nearly a month, “mainly due to the breakdown of the principal crown witnesses under the pitiless cross examination of Mr. Bole.”25

Bole mounted a vigorous defense of Hall, first by calling two witnesses who suggested that the gun might have discharged accidentally, although under cross-examination the first witness was forced to admit that Hall was an experienced marksman who hunted regularly, had owned this particular firearm since 1871, and carried it with him habitually in the woods. The second witness, the retired captain George Pittendrigh, a veteran of the Crimean War and commander of the British Columbia Provincial Artillery, seemed to object to repeating rifles in general but had nothing specific to add to the circumstances of the crime.

As the only hope of saving his client’s life, Bole then attacked the credibility of the two eyewitnesses, first by pointing out minor inconsistencies between Peter Caulder’s statement to the coroner the day after the killing and that given before the court. He then challenged Chealtah’s account of the shooting, citing Stephen Decker’s testimony that at the time that she claimed to have witnessed her sister’s death, she had been in bed with him back at his residence on Bedwell Bay. Under cross-examination, when asked to positively identify the woman in question to the jury, Decker stumbled, saying, “They all look alike to me.”26

“I believe that woman [Chealtah] to be a perjurer,” Bole argued in his

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.