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Parliamentary Debates During the Third Session of the Seventh Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, appointed to meet at Westminster, the Fifth Day of February 1822, in the Third Year of the Reign of His Majesty King GEORGE the Fourth. HOUSE OF COMMONS. Wednesday, April 24, 1822. ILCHESTER GOAL-TREATMENT OF MR. HUNT.] The Marquis of Titchfield presented a petition from Lynn, praying the interference of the House for a remission of the remainder of Mr. Hunt's imprisonment. The noble marquis read an extract from the petition, in which it spoke of " the unrelenting severity practised towards the victim of ministerial hate, by the petty tyrants in whose power he was placed." The petition then referred, as a precedent for the interference of the House on the present occasion, to their having interfered to pro. cure the remission of the punishment of sir Manasseh Lopez, whose crime was ten thousand times greater than the one imputed to Mr. Hunt. The noble marquis said, he fully concurred in the prayer of the petition, but although he concurred in the prayer, he differed from the petitioners in the reasons which they assigned; for, notwithstanding all he felt upon this subject, it did appear to him that ministers had done no more than their duty in ordering the prosecution of Mr. Hunt. For courts of justice he had the highest respect, and he should not, therefore, be disposed to listen to any thing against their decisions, without the strongest grounds; but the same respect for them made him wish, that they should not become the innocent instruments of unnecessary severity. In looking at the sentence on Mr. Hunt, he certainly did think it a severe one; and it had been rendered much more so, by the great severity with VOL. VII. NEW! (Series) which he had been treated. So much was this the fact, that he looked upon two years imprisonment or less, in the place to which he happened to be sent, as worse than two years and a half in any other prison. Under these circumstances, he considered that, in wishing for a remission of the remainder of the punishment, he was not recommending him to the favour of the Crown, but asking for him a measure of simple justice. He was not one who thought that the House ought lightly to interfere with courts of justice, and especially in a case like the present, as he had no doubt whatever of the illegality of the meeting at which Mr. Hunt presided; but looking at all the circumstances which had since occurred, he thought the home department were called upon to interpose, and advise the Crown to the exercise of its prerogative of mercy. Ordered to lie on the table. MOTION TO REMIT THE REMAINDER oF MR. HUNT'S IMPRISONMENT.] Sir Francis Burdett said, that after the numerous petitions which had been presented to the House on the subject respecting which he then rose to address it, and in favour of the motion with which he intended to conclude, and after the able manner in which those petitions had been supported, and especially that presented by a noble lord from Lynn, in Norfolk, he felt somewhat embarrassed regarding the manner in which he should address them, because he thought that the noble lord, though shortly, had strongly occupied all the grounds on which he felt it B his duty to press this subject on the attention of parliament; the noble lord having delivered his sentiments in a style that could not fail to produce a strong impression upon the House, from the unaffected simplicity of his language and manner. [Hear.] He must repeat, that he felt more than usually anxious, anxious as he was upon all occasions, in opening a question so materially affecting the liberty of the individual concerned, and so interesting as it appeared, from the numerous petitions from all quarters of the country, to be to the public at large, and when there were strong symptoms of its being favourably considered by a large portion of the House itself. He was also apprehensive that he might not forward, but, by an over-zealous effort retard the object he had in view; namely, the liberation of an individual from an imprisonment which, in the mind, of all impartial men, was a more than adequate punishment for any crime of which he had been found guilty. He must own, that up to the latest moment, he had entertained strong hopes that the ministers of the Crown would have spared him the trouble of addressing the House upon this question. He had been in hopes, that when so plain and palpable a course of proceeding was open before them a course at once consistent with justice and propriety-a course that would not have been less grateful than just-grateful to the public mind on many accounts, of which the omission would answer no one purpose, but the accomplishment of all those ends which ought to be avoided-namely, that of creating a sympathy with the individual suffering, from a feeling that the crime bore no proportion to the magnitude of the punishment. Under all these circumstances, he had been in hopes that ministers would have recommended the Crown to do that which he did not despair of still persuading them to do, if the House should support him in his present motion. Notwithstanding the difficulty under which the members of administration sometimes laboured, and those trammels by which they felt themselves bound to support generally what they did not on all occasions individually approve, he did not altogether despair of having the able and efficient assistance of the right hon. secretary for the home department on the present occasion. He flattered himself the more with the hope of obtaining it, be cause, on his having occasion to apply to that right hon. gentleman on behalf of two persons, who lived near his residence in the North, who had been sentenced to a punishment which appeared more than commensurate with their offence, and who bore, indeed, so good a character that their neighbours doubted whether they had been properly convicted; he repeated, that on making known their cases to the right hon. gentleman, he had, with a promptitude and humanity that were highly to his credit, taken them into consideration, and afterwards recommended a mitigation of their punishment. He would not say, that he was obliged to the right hon. gentleman for the attention that he had thus paid; he would not pay him the parliamentary compliments usually offered on such occasions, not from any want of courtesy towards him, but from a wish that the right hon. gentleman would take what had fallen from him as he intended it—as a tribute to his integrity and assiduous attention to the duties of his office, and without any regard to the quarter from which it came. Under these circumstances, he trusted, that if he made out the following proposi tions-first, that the sentence on Mr. Hunt was sufficiently severe for the crime of which he had been convicted (and here he must observe, that it was not necessary for his argument to impugn that sen tence); and secondly, that the mode of carrying it into execution had augmented it tenfold, and in a manner which the judges themselves never dreamt of—if he made out these propositions, he trusted he should have done that which would ensure him the support of the right hon. gentleman. Besides these two reasons for liberating Mr. Hunt, he had another, which, though he placed last, he did not value least. He thought that gentleman had a claim, and a strong claim too, upon the public, for having brought to light, circumstances, and for having conducted to a successful termination the important inquiry which had been lately instituted into the treatment of prisoners in Ilchester Gaol. In treating of the first proposition which he had laid down, he must beg leave to call the attention of the House to the nature of the charge against Mr. Hunt. In stating that charge, he could not help observing, in passing, the great hardships that sometimes arose from legal proceedings in this country. When a person had different charges preferred non facit reum, nisi mens sit rea"; but, in Mr. Hunt's case, a new practice had been introduced: the intention of his mind was not considered; his knowledge of the legality or illegality of his conduct at Manchester was not inquired into; though it was clear, from his previous deportment and his peculiar character, that he would not have adopted that course of proceeding which he afterwards did adopt, had he known it to be in violation of the law. It was not unnecessary, at this stage of the argument, to repeat that the magistrates had sanctioned the meeting of the 16th of August, by not protesting against it; and with regard to what took place at that meeting, he must repeat what he had said on a former occasion, that he was at a loss to know what the crime was of which Mr. Hunt had been guilty, either individually or collectively with others. However, let his guilt have been what it might, no person could say, that an imprisonment of two years and a half was not a punishment sufficient for it. Our old lawyers, who were men who valued highly the freedom of the subject, were accustomed to hold, that the slightest corporal infliction or deprivation of freedom was a much severer punishment than the heaviest fine. If that doctrine were sound, then again must the House admit the great severity of the sentence on Mr. Hunt. Indeed, he would ask them, if an imprisonment of two years and a half was not more than sufficient for so small an offence as that on which Mr. Hunt was convicted, to what period of time they would have limited his confinement, supposing he had been found guilty of the heavier charges preferred against him? If they observed the same proportion, Mr. Hunt's whole life would not be sufficient for the punishment, unless, indeed, it were prolonged to the age of Methusalem; and not even then, unless the life of Dr. Colston were extended to the same age also. [Hear, hear, and a laugh.] against him in what were called the different counts of an indictment, containing every gradation of guilt, from the highest to the lowest, the hardship was, that after a defendant had been acquitted on all the heavy charges, after he had been found guilty of only one small part of one of the charges, by a jury which took five hours to deliberate on their verdict, and which acquitted him of all the rest, and even of all the heavy part of that individual charge on which they found him guilty -the hardship, he repeated it, was, that the persecuting lawyers might direct the jury to find a defendant guilty upon that count which contained the minimum of guilt, and which, if it had stood alone, would never have been thought fit to form the subject of an indictment. In legislating regarding the fisheries in some of the rivers of the country, the House had passed acts to prevent the meshes of the nets used in them from being made so small as to catch the smallest fish. Now, it was particularly hard that these legal meshes should be made so small that even offenders of the slightest nature could not escape them. There was no evidence to support the heavy charges that were imputed to Mr. Hunt; but the narrow meshes of the law were drawn so tightly around him, that it became impossible for him to escape. Even if Mr. Hunt had been found guilty of the heavy part of the charges preferred against him, he would say, that the punishment inflicted on him was a severe punishment. But, when he recollected, that the offence of which Mr. Hunt had been found guilty was a misdemeanor, and was classed by Blackstone inter minora delicta, for which an imprisonment of from one to six months was deemed sufficient, he was compelled to say, that the visiting it with the punishment of imprisonment for two years and a half, was more than sufficient for the purpose of justice. But Mr. Hunt's offence, was even minimus inter minora; for of all the charges preferred against him, that on which he was convicted was the slightest; so that they had the anomaly before them, of a man suffering a heavy punishment for a crime that was as small as possible. A great deal more might be said on this part of the subject; because, at the time of Mr. Hunt's committing the offence for which he was now suffering, he was, in mind at least, as innocent a man as could be. It was an would ancient maxim of English law, that "actus the House, when the state of Ilchester He next came to the second proposition which he had laid down, having, as he trusted, rendered it impossible for any person to doubt of the severity of the punishment which Mr. Hunt was now enduring. In entering upon this part of his subject, he did not intend to introduce any topics that were extraneous from it, or to forestall that discussion which come more naturally before |