The Lords:
¶Heard the second murder case appealed to Their Lordships in the entire history of Parliament (640 years).
The prisoner, a young Dorset farm laborer named Reginald Woolmington, sat between two strapping warders on a back bench in the gallery from which he could not even see his august judges, the three Lords of Appeal, the Lord Chief Justice of England and the Lord High Chancellor. "I have given up hope," said Prisoner Woolmington, convicted at Somerset of murdering his 17-year-old wife and again found guilty before Mr. Justice Swift at Bristol on appeal.
"This case," Attorney General Sir Thomas Inskip informed Their Lordships, "involves a legal point of exceptional urgency."
Ensued hours of lordly legal buzz-buzz, enlivened when Baron Atkin, a Lord of Appeal, murmured: "But ought we not to inspect the actual sawed-off shotgun?"
Hampered by his wig and robe, the counsel for the Crown found it difficult indeed to manipulate the sawed-off shotgun and failed to convince Their Lordships that the prisoner was lying when he said he shot his wife by accident. Announced the Lord High Chancellor at last: "The contents have it."—which meant nothing whatsoever to the lout in the gallery on trial for his life.
"Stand up," ordered a warder, and Reginald Woolmington stood up, still uncomprehending. Said the warder afterward: "It took us I should say 20 minutes to make him realize that Their Lordships had set him free, that he is innocent."
Their Lordships, having thus loftily reversed a murder conviction on appeal for the first time in the life of the Mother of Parliaments, went home to dinner with their minds full of tne "legal point of exceptional urgency."
Point: The lower courts left Woolmington to prove, if he could, his contention that he shot his wife by accident, ordered him hanged when he failed to do so. Instead, ruled Their Lordships, the burden of proof was upon the Crown to show, if it could, that Woolmington did not shoot his wife by accident but by intent, which the Crown failed to do. Therefore Woolmington, though he undoubtedly shot his wife and may have murdered her, is guiltless.
¶Pinned down the jingoistic Earl Stanhope, Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, to account for his efforts at Geneva to sabotage President Roosevelt's proposal for enforced armament publicity in all the Great Powers. Ingeniously the Earl explained : "I am extremely doubtful whether the Senate of the United States would ever agree that an international committee with Japanese and other foreigners upon it should be allowed to inspect American factories in order to see that the United States Government was telling the truth and rendering an accurate return to the League of Nations."
To this Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, old-time British peace-peer, retorted with scorn for Stanhope in his tone: "It is perfectly hopeless to speculate as to what the United States would do. The Senate is just as likely to reject a scheme on the ground it is too small as to reject it on the ground it is too large. The only thing that can be done is to get the best treaty possible and hope for the best when it gets to America."