References: [1670] EngR 33, (1670) 2 Eden 384, (1670) 28 ER 947
Links: Commonlii
Laurence, Lord Ferrers, His Majesty, from his royal and equal regard to justice, and his steady attention to our constitution (which hath endeared him in a wonderful manner to the universal duty and affection of his subjects) hath commanded this inquiry to be made, upon the blood of a very ordinary subject, against your Lordship a peer of this realm. Your Lordship hath been arraigned; hath pleaded and put yourself on your peers, and they (whose judicature is founded and subsists in wisdom, honor and justice) have unanimously found your Lordship guilty of the felony and murder charged in the indictment.
It is usual, my Lord, for courts of justice before they pronounce the dreadful sentence ordained by the law, to open to the prisoner the nature of the crime of which he is convicted ; not in order to aggravate or afflict, but to awaken the mind to a due attention to, and consideration of the unhappy situation into which he hath brought himself.
My Lord, the crime of which your Lordship is found guilty, murder, is incapable of aggravation; and it is impossible but that during your Lordship’s long confinement, you must have reflected upon it, represented to your mind in its deepest shades, and with all its train of dismal and detestable consequences.
As your Lordship hath received no benefit, so you can derive no consolation from that refuge you seemed almost ashamed to take under a pretended insanity ; since it hath appeared to us all, from your cross examination of the King’s witnesses, that you recollected the minutest circumstances of facts and conversations to which you and the witnesses only could be privy, with the exactness of a memory more than ordinarily sound : it is therefore as unnecessary as it would be painful to me, to dwell longer on a subject so black and dreadful.
It is with much more satisfaction that I can remind your Lordship, that though
from the present tribunal before which you now stand, you can receive nothing but strict and equal justice ; yet, you are soon to appear before an Almighty Judge, whose unfathomable wisdom is able, by means incomprehensible to our narrow capacities, to reconcile justice with mercy.
