Morbid Fact Du Jour For May 7, 2009
Today’s Deaf and Dumb Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
In 1735 at Nottingham assizes an alleged murderer, apparently deaf and dumb from birth, was unable to plead, and was pressed to death. The judges believed that the accused had only pretended to be dumb, as was discovered – too late for the prisoner to plead – to be the case in Ireland in 1740. Mathew Ryan was accused of highway robbery at Kilkenny assizes. A moving description of the incident was published in The Percy Anecdotes (vol VIII, 1823):
“The judges on this desired the prisoner to plead, but he still pretended to be insensible to all that was said to him. The law now called for the peine forte et dure; but the judges compassionately deferred awarding it until a future day, in the hope that he might in the meantime acquire a juster sense of his situation. When again brought up, however, the criminal persisted in his refusal to plead: and the court at last pronounced the dreadful sentence, that he should be pressed to death. The sentence was accordingly executed upon him two days after in the public market-place of Kilkenny. As the weights were heaping on the wretched man, he earnestly supplicated to be hanged; but it being beyond the power of the sheriff to deviate from the mode of punishment prescribed in the sentence, even this was an indulgence which could no longer be granted to him.”
Culled from: The History Of Torture
