In the barn whither John Jessop and John Allock had retired, the two companions each drank half of the laudanum. They had resolved to die together. They were found insensible; Jessop was restored to life, but Allock succumbed. The survivor was conveyed to the Nottingham Assizes, indicted for having aided his fellow in self-destruction.
On the 4th of February, 1887, Mr Justice Field presided over the court. Jessop was charged with attempting his own life and with having afforded Allock such assistance as rendered him, in the eyes of the Crown, a murderer. The prosecution rested upon a fact as simple as it was terrible: two men had jointly compassed their end, yet but one remained to answer for the covenant before the tribunal.
They were friends, both lacking employment and destitute of resources. Each had lost his situation; neither saw any issue from his wretchedness. According to the depositions made by Jessop prior to his trial, Allock proposed the suicide, inquiring whether he would consent to die by his side. Jessop answered that he had no further taste for life and would bear him company. Allock already possessed a phial of laudanum, yet the draught seemed insufficient to their purpose. They purchased further quantities from various druggists and chemists, and mingled the poison into a single store.
Repairing to a barn, they divided the drops with meticulous care, each draining an equal moiety. Both presently lost all consciousness. Passers-by discovered them stretched upon the ground and endeavoured to revive them. Jessop recovered his faculties and slowly regained his strength; no ministrations could save Allock, who was consigned to the earth. There the equality of the division ceased. He who had chosen death stood henceforth alone before his judges.
The indictment preferred two distinct counts: Jessop’s attempt upon his own life, and his participation in the death of Allock, charged as murder. In the view of the Crown, the survival of the former did not sever the covenant sealed within the barn; it merely rendered possible the prosecution that the deceased had escaped. Mr Horace Smith and Mr Bruce Russell maintained this construction before the jury. It fell to Mr Appleton, for the defence, to urge the vital distinction between originating such a compact and yielding subsequent consent.
Jessop had related to sundry persons how the design was conceived. His narrative ascribed the initiative to Allock, who had produced the first phial and made the initial proposal. The record establishes likewise Jessop’s participation in the procurement of the supplementary doses and in their apportioning. He was thus no mere bystander witnessing an unforeseen catastrophe: the survivor confessed to having embraced the scheme and partaken of his own share of the poison. The question turned upon whether such concert constituted him, in law, the author of his companion’s death.
To the prosecution, the law of England admitted of but one reply. Suicide was accounted a felony committed against one’s own person, and the attempt, an attempt to commit murder. He who succeeded in quitting life escaped all terrestrial chastisement; he who survived was answerable for his attempt at the assizes. Where two persons agreed to destroy themselves, each became an accessory to the death of the other. Should one perish and the other endure, the survivor was liable to indictment for the murder of his fellow, over and above the attempt upon his own life. The prosecution demanded that Jessop be found guilty under this principle.
To this doctrine, the defence opposed the precedent of Regina v. Alison. In that cause, the prisoner had brought the poison and prevailed upon his companion to swallow it. Here, argued Mr Appleton, Allock had already determined to die and had proffered the pact; Jessop had merely acceded to a resolution formed independently by the other. This distinction reached the very heart of the inquiry: could he who entices a wavering mind toward poison be placed on an equal footing with one who merely consents to perish with a friend already resolved? In Appleton’s view, Allock’s intent preceded Jessop’s concurrence; the accession of the second could not be confounded with the instigation of the first. For the Crown, on the contrary, the mutual pact and common aid sufficed, the moment both men had carried the design into execution.
Mr Justice Field set aside the distinction submitted by Appleton. He directed the jurors that, should they hold the common design to be proven—and in his view the evidence was complete—it was their duty to find Jessop guilty. The jury obeyed this instruction regarding the death of Allock, while recommending the survivor to the mercy of the Queen. The defence had severed Allock’s initiative from Jessop’s consent; the verdict encompassed the pact as an indivisible whole.
It fell to the judge to pronounce the doom. Field sentenced Jessop to death; the Crown subsequently commuted the penalty to penal servitude. The chronicler observes that the judge was constrained to pass sentence of death upon a verdict of murder, leaving the exercise of clemency solely to the Sovereign. He recalls that, in earlier times, the bench possessed the authority to record the sentence while respiting its execution pending the royal pleasure—a practice he describes as amounting almost to an assured commutation. Subsequent reform had stripped the court of this discretion, lest the magistrate intermingle his own appreciation of the facts with that of the jury.
Following the commutation, the author pursues his indictment against the rule of law itself. He carries the paradox so far as to aver that the State would have executed upon Jessop, in the name of justice, that which the unfortunate had sought to inflict upon himself; the royal mercy, in his eyes, spared the prisoner’s life without removing the brand of murderer or reforming the statute. He writes that Parliament, absorbed by other cares, gave no heed to the matter, and that The Times accorded it, on the morrow, but a few fleeting lines. He pleaded for the reform and codification of the criminal law; in his judgment, the prevailing inaction arose from the circumstance that such an undertaking offered neither party advantage nor an avenue to power. In the exercise of the prerogative of mercy, he saw only a belated palliative for a law he deemed monstrous. This gloss remains his own, and not that of the court. He drew a sharp line between the legality of the sentence and its equity: though the verdict adhered to the doctrine upheld by Field, it remained, to his mind, an outrage. The controversy itself was left unresolved.