For nine days the murder trial of Berlin-born Gunther Fritz Podola, 30, was postponed while a London jury considered a plea the like of which had never before been heard in an English court of law (TIME, Sept. 21). The plea: in "the very severe fright" caused by the violence of his arrest, Podola had lost his memory, and so was unfit to plead to the charge of shooting a London cop. Last week, after a procession of experts had offered conflicting medical opinion on whether Podola was, in fact, suffering from "hysterical amnesia," the jury finally decided that he was fit to stand trial.
Next day, when the full trial finally got under way, Podola coolly persisted in his disclaimer: "I do not remember the crime for which I stand accused ... I am unable to answer the charges." The jury spent only 38 minutes in arriving at a verdict of guilty. Covering his wig with the dread black cap, Judge Edmund Davies slowly told Podola: "You have been convicted on evidence of the most compelling character and certainty of the capital murder* of a police officer by shooting him down in the prime of his manhood. For that foul and terrible deed but one sentence is prescribed, and that I now pronounce."
Before anyone else in the courtroom could move, Gunther Podola turned calmly away and stepped quickly and surely down the steps from the dock to the cells below. Faithful to the last to his profession of emotional shock and indifference, he showed no sign of realizing that he had just been sentenced to die on the gallows.
*Under Britain's 1957 Homicide Act, the only murders for which the death penalty is prescribed or permitted are those committed 1) with firearms or explosives, 2) against police or prison officers, 3) in resisting arrest or escaping from custody, 4) in furtherance of theft, or 5) for murder committed a second or subsequent time.