[Transcriber's Note: original has 1559.]
On the charge of murder they were not tried in September. Sir
Christopher Turner would not proceed 'because the body of Harrison was
not found.' There was no _corpus delicti_, no evidence that Harrison
was really dead. Meanwhile John Perry, as if to demonstrate his
lunacy, declared that his mother and brother had tried to poison him
in prison! At the Spring Assizes in 1661, Sir B. Hyde, less legal than
Sir Christopher Turner, did try the Perrys on the charge of murder.
How he could do this does not appear, for the account of the trial is
not in the Record House, and I am unable at present to trace it. In
the _Arminian Magazine_, John Wesley publishes a story of a man who
was hanged for murdering another man, whom he afterwards met in one of
the Spanish colonies of South America. I shall not here interrupt the
tale of the Perrys by explaining how a hanged man met a murdered man,
but the anecdote proves that to inflict capital punishment for murder
without proof that murder has been committed is not only an illegal
but an injudicious proceeding. Probably it was assumed that Harrison,
if alive, would have given signs of life in the course of nine or ten
months.
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