Brit. Law, 1910: confession, pleading guilty

Guilt and innocence pleas are not unique to US law. But throwing himself at the mercy of the court might be a better description of what you're talking about.

Jeff

I think even in 1910, a prosecutor might have been willing to, say, reduce the charge to manslaughter in exchange for a plea of guilty. I'm not sure, however, if he could have guaranteed the sentence, which would still be up to the judge, if the charge remained capital murder.

It's a little later than your period, but in Five Red Herrings, I believe, the killer ends up sentenced to 10 years for manslaughter, apparently on the grounds that the victim was a jerk and had finally picked on someone his own size.

The offence of murder is committed when a person takes a life with intent. The intent may have been only to harm, but if the victim dies, the crime is murder. The intent does not have to be premeditated. A spur of the moment killing is still classed as murder, provided the intent is still there. Manslaughter is the taking of a life without intent to do so. So, if a man deliberately fires a gun at a group of people, killing one of them, he has committed murder, since, by aiming, he intended to do harm. If he was carrying the loaded gun, tripped and unintentionally pulled the trigger, killing one of them, the offence is manslaughter. That is why motive to kill, leading to intent to kill is very important in cases of murder.

In 1910, the mandatory sentence for murder was death by hanging. The judge had no discretion. The law insisted that he place a square of black cloth (the "black cap") over his wig and say:
" Name of the accused, you will be taken hence to the prison in which you were last confined and from there to a place of execution where you will be hanged by the neck until you are dead and thereafter your body buried within the precincts of the prison and may the Lord have mercy upon your soul".

If a person pleaded guilty to murder, they were still sentenced to death. A guilty plea merely saved the court's time. If there were mitigating circumstances (e.g. the killer acted in self-defence, or in defence of another person) and this can be proved in court the mandatory death sentence could be commuted to a suitable term of imprisonment (usually life, but the actual circumstances could mean a lesser sentence.) The power to commute a sentence, once passed, lies only with the Secretary of State for Home Affairs (aka the Home Secretary.) In a colony, sometimes the Governor of the colony was given the power to commute sentences.

A person found guilty of murder, or pleading guilty to the offence, and sentenced to death had the right to appeal against the conviction and/or the sentence, but the Appeal Court was very likely to uphold the conviction and sentence, on the grounds that, if someone pleaded guilty to murder, they had admitted the crime and, if they had pleaded not guilty, but were still convicted and sentenced, that all the evidence and arguments had already been weighed by a properly-instructed jury and the decision of the court was just.

Plea-bargaining per se doesn't really exist in English jurisprudence. A prosecution will only be brought if the prosecuting authorities believe that there is a strong chance of a conviction. If that is in doubt, the accused will not be charged with the offence. If there are lesser charges which can be more readily proved, the accused would be charged with those.

If the accused has co-operated fully with the investigating and prosecuting authorities and shows true remorse, these days, this will be taken into consideration by the court and may result in a lighter sentence, but this rarely happens in cases of murder. An accused person who committed murder in concert with others can turn "King's / Queen's evidence," where he enters into an agreement with the prosecutors to testify against his accomplices. This would not result in him/her walking free, but would often result in the person turning "King's Evidence" being sentenced to a term of imprisonment, or in the 19th century, transportation, while those against whom he testified were hanged. Full immunity was/is rarely if ever granted. The main exceptions to this are the modern "supergrasses," professional criminals who agreed to testify against numbers of high-level criminals in exchange for immunity from prosecution. The granting of immunity to one, or two individuals was considered a price worth paying to break up gangs of organised criminals and put many of their leaders and members behind bars for a very long time.

The ancient "Year and a day rule" wasn't repealed in England until 1996. Until then, if the victim of an attack died of his injuries more than a year and a day after the attack, his assailant could not be charged with murder.

So,with apologies for the length of this post, in 1910, under English law (I say English, rather than British, as the Scots have a somewhat different legal system - but not with regards to murder.) if your character pleads not guilty and claims self-defence, but his claim is later disproved to the satisfaction of the court, he will undoubtedly hang. If, at first, he claims self-defence, but changes his plea to guilty when told that there is evidence to disprove his claim, he will still hang. The intentional killing of an unarmed man by one who was armed has to be a case of murder, even if the victim had attacked the accused first. The lethal use of a weapon to defend oneself against an unarmed assailant is considered to be in excess of what, these days, is called "the use of reasonable force" to fend off the attack. So, whichever way you look at it, your character would be facing the gallows. Sorry.

aruna said:

The unusual thing about this case is that the perpetrator is white and the victim Indian, at a time when white "masters" could get away with --- well, murder. In the past, the same perpetrator has managed to evade justice when he has whipped his Indian labourers, and again expected to walk free -- as did the entire white community.

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That makes a big difference. I'm assuming that by "Indian" you mean a native of the Indian sub-continent, either in India itself, or elsewhere around the Indian Ocean. Although slavery had been abolished many years before 1910, the British Empire was at its zenith, together with its undiluted racism. Often the racism was aggressive and harsh, with white people treating and regarding the natives as little better than animals. Sometimes, it attempted to be benign, with the whites regarding natives as uneducated and unenlightened children, born to serve, but also to be cared for. Whatever, the majority of the Brits stationed, or working in the far-flung outposts of the Empire truly regarded natives as a vastly inferior race. The kindest way they thought of them was as "noble savages."

It would be unusual for a white sahib,even a lowly ranking common soldier, to be brought to trial for the killing of an Indian, unless the Indian was from a high-ranking family. If the victim was from a lower caste, the killer's superiors would sometimes order him to pay a sum of money to the victim's family and the matter was considered settled. If the victim was highly-born, there would be a need to mollify his family and, then, the social status of the killer would come into play. If the killer was working-class, again, our common soldier, there could be a trial and he could even face the death penalty, not so much for the crime, but to calm the native population. While they regarded themselves as superior to the natives, the Brits in the colonies were always aware that they were vastly outnumbered. If the killer was from a higher social stratum, the white establishment would close ranks behind him and, while there might be a trial, it is highly likely that it would be a travesty of justice and the killer would go free, or be let off with a fine. In such a trial, the word of a white man, even when controverted by native witnesses, would usually be accepted as the truth.

It wasn't until after the Great War that the authorities in the British Empire began truly to regard all men as equal in the eyes of the law, irrespective of race and that process was long and hard.

The interplay between race and social class and its effects on the concept and practice of justice could open up some fascinating and intriguing facets in your story. All the best with it.

This, I have to read. As we Brits, colonial, or otherwise, say; "Sounds like just my cup of tea."