The Indictment was opened by Mr. POOLEY.

Mr. GARROW,

May it please your Lordship,

Gentlemen, I have the honor of attending you in order to discharge the duty which belongs to the Counsel for the Crown, in stating the circumstances of this case.

Gentlemen, we are engaged in a very awful and most important enquiry, which will require your best and undivided and particular attention.

You will not expect from me, in opening this case to you, that I should enter into any elaborate argument, or endeavour by any subtilty of reasoning, to lead you to the conclusion to which I, who have to state it to you, must necessarily have arrived, that the justice of it will in the result call upon you to pronounce the Prisoner guilty; you will attend entirely to the evidence as it shall be laid before you in this place, and you will consider what I shall have the honor of addressing to you merely as an index to that evidence, and intended to assist you with the greater facility to pursue it in its details, and to attend to it with such observations as you will by and by receive upou it from his Lordship.

Gentlemen, as at this place, and at this time, you are somewhat unusually assembled, it may not be unfitting, and I hope his Lordship will not consider it to be so, if I say a word or two to you upon that subject; I do it the rather because it affords me an opportunity, in the name of the public justice of the Country, and I may be permitted to add too, in the name of the Prisoner, whom I prosecute, to make an humble offering of thanks to his Lordship for having thus assembled us. We have to lament (I wish I could flatter myself that this would be the last time in my professional life, that I should have to make a similar complaint) that upon this melancholy and

most important subject, there have been but too many details in the public prints.

The Prisoner would, in the ordinary course of justice, have been tried at the Assizes holden by his Lordship in a different part of the County from that in which you are now assembled. The case had excited much curiosity, the indictment was found at that Assize, and was there naturally the subject of much conversation, and therefore his Lordship, in that anxious attention which all British Judges pay to the security of the subject, has thought it fitter to adjourn to this place, and to direct new summonses to you now for the first time called, to the consideration of the case, in order that, between the public and the Prisoner, there may be a fair and satisfactory deliverance, and from you I have no doubt that it may confidently be expected, and will be received.

Gentlemen, I take the liberty of saying one word more. If you have had the misfortune, as but too probably you may, to have read, before it could have entered into the imagination of any one of you, that you would be to pass as a Juryman upon this trial, any account of this melancholy transaction; for God's sake do your best to dismiss it from your recollection, and bring yourselves to the pure consideration of the evidence alone. Permit me, too, to observe, that prejudice against the person accused is not the only mischief to be dreaded from these dangerous and most improper and ill-timed publications; there is another, against which I take the liberty of cautioning you, there is danger that with the best intentions you may suspect yourselves of an improper bias, and because you may have heard something out of doors, a distrust of yourselves might lead to a failure 'to do your duty; you will not, I am persuaded, fall into such a fatal impropriety. You will recollect the oath you have taken, to make a true deliverance between the King and the Defendant; you will do that by attending to the evidence, and I am sure the Public and the Prisoner will alike have reason to be *satisfied.

Gentlemen, I will proceed to state the relative situations of the unfortunate deceased, and the Prisoner now accused at your Bar.-I shall endeavour to make you acqainted with the situation of the premises in which the deceased resided, and where he met his death.-I shall state to you what appears to me; but here again, I caution you to reject all I say that does not, by the evidence laid before you, meet with full confirmation as that evidence goes along. No man will accuse me, I am sure, of designedly stating one syllable to inflame you, or mislead you, but it may happen, that having looked at this case with a view to discharge the very anxious duty I am now discharging, and which I would fain have retired from, if I could have done it with propriety, the circumstances may have struck me in a light stronger than they ought to do.-You will correct my errors -you will be most ably and most powerfully assisted in making that correction.

I shall proceed in stating the relative situations of these parties, a situation which, if the Defendant be guilty of this murder, places him in the condition of one of the worst men the history of mankind has ever presented us with; as a man who deliberately sought the occasion of bringing his best benefactor and friend into the toils of mischief, and there with determined purpose of destroying him, taking away that life which had been for a considerable time spent for his benefit.-A case which if it is not indeed petit treason, is next of kin to that crime.-I believe amounting to petit treason.-I shall proceed then to give you an account of the premises in which these parties resided, and in which this deed was perpetrated, from whence I apprehend that it will result, that it is absolutely impossible-I say it advisedly, it is absolutely impossible that any other hand could have occasioned the death of Mr. Blight than the hand of the Prisoner at the bar.

I shall proceed to detail other circumstances to you, from whence I apprehend that it will, with almost equal certainty, result, that by his hand Mr. Blight came to his death.

I shall be under the necessity of detailing to you the demeanor, the conduct, and the conversations of the Prisoner, from whence the same result, in my humble judgment, seems necessarily to follow; and, I shall then produce to you some circumstances in evidence, in which, without suspecting myself of being very superstitious, I have persuaded myself that I see the directing hand of Providence to arrest guilt in its career, and to bring the guilty to punish

ment.

Gentlemen, the deceased, Mr. Blight, lived in the neighbourhood of Greenland-Dock, where he had, for a considerable time, carried on extensively the business of a Ship-breaker, which you know consists in purchasing ships and breaking them up in order to make a profit of their materials; he had, for a menial servant in his family, a sister of the Prisoner Patch, and you will find that in the spring of the year 1803 (and it will not be material for me to burden your recollection with more than two or three dates) you will find in the spring of 1803 the Prisoner came to pay a visit to his sister, then a menial servant in the family of Mr. Blight.-She asked per mission for her brother to remain there that night, which was granted, and then he represented himself to be a person in very distressed circumstances, who had been under the necessity of leaving the West of England on account of the embarrassment of his affairs, and some dispute about tithes, and that he would be glad to enter into the meanest employment that could produce him a living; and you will find that an important fact in this case, when you come to compare it with some circumstances which I shall state presently. You will find that he in fact engaged in the service of Mr. Blight merely for his victuals and drink; no salary, no wages, but merely working for his victuals and drink; we find him then, in the spring of 1803, a considerably distressed man, He continued for some time upon this footing with Mr. Blight, and then being, I believe, a valuable servant, by employing himself usefully in the

concerns of his master, he agreed to give him in addition to the board he had had before, thirty pounds a year, by way of salary; he went on for some time upon this footing, and at length desiring rather to board himself, than to board in the family, his salary was raised to an hundred a year.

We find his history then to be this, that he leaves his home in the spring of 1803, that he is a sort of outcast without any means of subsistence, that at length he gets into a situation where, by his hard labour, he is earning the sum of a hundred pounds per annum.

You will find that, in the year 1803, Mr. Blight became somewhat embarrassed in his circumstances, and that it became necessary for him to call his creditors together, and to make arrangements with them for the purpose of settling his affairs, and there was a deed of composition executed, a sort of thing you know which takes place frequently, and by which the ruins of his affairs were to be divided among his creditors, and he to be made a free man.

You will find the Prisoner afterwards taking a very important, share in this transaction, and I believe furnishing, from that transaction, a clue to that guilt which this Indictment imputes to him; probably some of you know, that upon these arrangements being made, the object is to make an equal distribution of the property amongst all the creditors, as the operation of the Bankrupt law is; so that if all do not come in; but if A, for instance, stands out, and insists upon payment of his whole debt, it is usually provided that the deed shall become void and of no effect; then the person, of course, becomes possessed again of his own property, subject to all its liabilities, It appears that one of the creditors of Mr. Blight did not consent to this deed, or, which is the same thing in effect, perhaps had paid a sum of money after the execution of the deed, which did not range under it, and therefore threw the arrangement into confusion; in consequence of which, in an evil hour, it occurred to Mr. Blight, that it was necessary to