A colonial trial was never only a trial. In every one of these cases the verdict was reached by a local judge and, usually, a local jury, and then moved up or out through machinery that sat elsewhere: a governor with the power of mercy, an executive council, a court of appeal that might be a ship’s voyage away, and at the top, in London, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. A reader who wants to know how colonial courts handled the multiple-victim case can follow nine of them from a Jamaican town square in 1773 to a Hong Kong courtroom two centuries later, and watch the same few questions come up. Who sat in judgment? Which deaths were allowed before the jury? What did the governor do with a plea for mercy? And when the accused went to London, what came back?
One of the nine was not a British court at all, and it is placed here with that said first. In 1921 Raya and Sakina Ali Hammam were tried and sentenced by an Egyptian court in Alexandria. Britain had occupied Egypt since 1882 and declared a protectorate in 1914, and the occupation shaped the city, the press and the way the case was told, but the judges were Egyptian and so was the law. It is the exception that shows what the colonial frame did and did not reach.
Lewis Hutchinson was executed in the square at Spanish Town on March 16, 1773. He was a Scottish settler described as a doctor, whose medical training is uncertain, and he lived on a remote estate in the hills of St Ann. In Jamaican tradition he is remembered as the man behind the deaths of travelers in the island’s interior, and the Jamaica Gleaner has called him the island’s first serial murderer. The court record that the newspaper accounts describe is much narrower. According to a 2002 feature in the Gleaner by Rebecca Tortello, he was tried for one killing only: that of John Callendar, a soldier who had come to arrest him.
The reason is a rule about who could speak in a Jamaican court. The deaths of travelers rested on the accounts of the enslaved people held on his estate, and Tortello wrote that their testimony was judged to be hearsay. He was therefore tried only for the murder of Callendar, pleaded not guilty, was represented by a respected lawyer, and was convicted. The court, the judge, the lawyer and the date of the trial have not been recorded in any published account. The evidence, Tortello wrote, also exposed others. Two men, James Walker and Roger Maddix, were convicted and sentenced to death for the murders of William Lickley and Timothy Cronin. One of three women said to have watched the death of Cronin, who was in possession of his watch and seal, pleaded not guilty and was acquitted. Whether the other women were charged, and whether Walker and Maddix were executed, has not been recorded. Tortello recorded that the trial records are held at the National Archives.
The result is a case in which a colonial court judged a man for the one death it could prove under its own rules about evidence, and left the larger story to memory. Paul H. Williams, in a 2024 Gleaner feature, notes how the rest comes down through later histories, local memory and the accounts of the enslaved witnesses. The number of people who died on his estate has never been recorded. A neighboring doctor, Jonathan Hutton, appears in both Gleaner features, but they conflict: Tortello wrote that he was injured and survived, Williams that he was among those Hutchinson was said to have killed. Hutton’s case was not among the charges reported at the trial. Williams also reports that in 1895, 122 years after the execution, the governor of Jamaica, Sir Henry Blake, and the superintendent of public works examined a site connected to the legend and reported no material evidence. The tradition, in other words, has outlasted every attempt to check it.
Hutchinson wrote his own epitaph, a couplet, and asked for it to be cut on a tombstone. The two Gleaner features print it slightly differently; Tortello gave the second line as "Despise their power, and like a Roman, die." The wish was not carried out.
John Lynch was an Irish convict, convicted at Cavan of obtaining goods by false pretences and sentenced to transportation for life, according to the data published by Convict Records of Australia. The database lists him as a ploughman who sailed on the Dunvegan Castle, which left on July 1, 1832, and reached New South Wales on October 16, 1832. The Berrima District Historical and Family History Society says he arrived at nineteen and was assigned as a servant at Oldbury, at Sutton Forest. The convict system was the colony’s labor supply, and a man in Lynch’s position lived under the law of the master he served.
He was tried at the Berrima Court House, which the courthouse museum says served as a Court of Assizes presided over by a judge of the Supreme Court from 1839 to 1846. Linda Emery’s 2026 history of Berrima Gaol in Highlife adds that the gaol was completed in 1839, held prisoners for the Assizes and Quarter Sessions, and became in the 1840s the place where some of the best-known murderers of the day were executed. The first man executed there was the bushranger Paddy Curran, sentenced in 1841 by the Chief Justice, Sir James Dowling; Lucretia Dunkley and Martin Beech were executed in October 1843. The Australian Dictionary of Biography records that Dowling had become the second chief justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales in 1837. Whether Dowling presided at Lynch’s trial is not recorded.
What the Society’s 2019 newsletter records is narrow. Lynch was acquitted, on a charge it dates to 1835, of the killing of Thomas Smith, a laborer at Oldbury. He was convicted at Berrima on March 21, 1842, of the murder of Kearns Landregan. No details of the arrest, the witnesses, the evidence or the length of the trial have been published. The sentence was death. The Society counts ten people as his victims in all, in a series of robberies between Sydney and Berrima, among them a farming household at Wombat Brush and a father and son, and it describes the killings as premeditated. Those are the Society’s counts; Lynch was tried for Landregan alone. The date of his execution is itself in dispute: Convict Records of Australia gives April 22, 1842, and the Society’s 2019 newsletter says he was executed on the day after his conviction. In 2019 the Society placed a plaque at All Saints, Sutton Forest, in memory of six of the people it counts among his victims.
Frederick Bailey Deeming was identified, arrested, tried and executed in less than three months, according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, and the speed has drawn criticism from historians ever since. He was convicted of the wilful murder of Emily Mather, a 26-year-old woman from Rainhill, near Liverpool, who had married him in September 1891 believing him to be an army inspector named Albert Oliver Williams. He was tried under that name, as Williams. Her death was placed at Windsor, a Melbourne suburb, about Christmas 1891. He was arrested at Southern Cross, Western Australia, on March 11, 1892, and returned to Melbourne by April 1.
The Victorian prosecution went first, and an English one never followed. Within days of the Melbourne deaths becoming known, police in Lancashire were drawn in, and on March 16 the first wife, Marie, and four children were identified as having died at Rainhill in 1891. A coroner’s jury at Rainhill returned a verdict of wilful murder against him on March 28, 1892. That verdict was a formal finding by an inquest jury, not a conviction. In 1892 an English coroner’s jury could name the person it believed responsible, but the accused was not tried by it, and no English trial followed. Victoria had custody of Deeming and the stronger case, and it went ahead first. He denied the Rainhill deaths to the end.
The Melbourne inquest ended on April 7, 1892, with a jury verdict of wilful murder and committal for trial. The mood outside the courtroom was what the Dictionary calls mass hysteria, and Melbourne called it "Deemania." Newspapers declared him guilty before his trial and called him "the criminal of the century" and "a human tiger." A play based on the case, staged by the actor-manager Alfred Dampier, ran in Melbourne in March and April 1892, before the trial. State Library Victoria notes that postcards linked him to Jack the Ripper, that cheap pamphlets sold his story and that his portrait was traded like a collector’s card. The Dictionary’s author, Barry O. Jones, writes that in his judgment the uproar destroyed Deeming’s right to be tried by an unprejudiced jury.
He was defended by William Forlonge and Alfred Deakin, then a 35-year-old barrister and member of the Victorian parliament who would later become prime minister of Australia. Deakin’s own entry in the Dictionary calls the defense the best known of his cases at the Bar and records that he took it without a fee. Counsel asked for a month’s adjournment so that evidence of Deeming’s medical history could be gathered from England and elsewhere, and so that public feeling could cool; Mr. Justice Henry Hodges of the Supreme Court of Victoria granted one week. The trial ran on April 28, 29 and 30 and May 2, 1892, with the Crown prosecutor, Mr. Walsh. Hodges, whose rudeness to litigants drew a formal protest from the Victorian Bar in 1913, was, the Dictionary notes, conspicuously fair when presiding over criminal trials.
The defense was insanity. Dr. John Springthorpe described what Deeming had told him, an account of a man named Ben Young at Rainhill that the reporters covering the trial immediately saw the weakness of: no one but Deeming had known anything of Rainhill until Emily’s death became known in Melbourne. Dr. J. W. Y. Fishbourne testified that he had examined Deeming and observed symptoms of brain disease. The Dictionary concludes that the psychiatric evidence was poorly presented, though it seems clear that Deeming was epileptic. When the Crown told the jury there was no evidence of insanity, Deeming interrupted and addressed the court himself. It was the press, not the law, that was trying him, he said, and witnesses had lied. On May 2, 1892, the jury returned a guilty verdict and added that he was not insane. Hodges sentenced him to death.
Here the colonial machinery ran its full length in three weeks. On May 9 the Executive Council of Victoria confirmed the sentence and set the execution for May 23. Letters asking for mercy poured into the Governor’s office, according to the Encyclopedia of Melbourne. His lawyers applied to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London for leave to appeal, supported by a statement from his two brothers that he had always been eccentric and by a Darlinghurst doctor’s certificate that he had treated Deeming there for severe epilepsy. On May 19, 1892, the Judicial Committee refused leave. The decision is reported as Ex parte Deeming in the Law Reports, Appeal Cases, for 1892. He was executed at Melbourne Gaol on May 23, 1892, aged 38, twelve years after the bushranger Ned Kelly at the same jail. State Library Victoria puts the crowd waiting outside at about 10,000.
Sarah Jane Makin and her husband John were tried together at the Central Criminal Court in Sydney in March 1893 for the murder of a single infant. The couple, a midwife and a former brewery drayman who lived by caring for unwanted babies, had taken infants for payment in the early 1890s. In October 1892 the deaths of two babies came to light at Macdonaldtown, in inner Sydney, and the police went on to search the properties the family had rented since 1890. The Dictionary of Biography records 13 infants; ABC News and the Illawarra Mercury give 15. How any of the children died was never established, and the inquests and the trial could not determine it, SBS News reports.
The indictment charged both defendants with the murder of Horace Murray or, if the identification of the child failed, of an unknown infant at Redfern on June 29, 1892. The Dictionary records that the family claimed at the first inquest to have had only one infant in their care and that it had been returned to its parents; the jury returned an open verdict. A coroner’s jury on November 28 returned open verdicts in four cases and recommended manslaughter charges over one child, and on December 21 a jury returned a verdict of murder in the case of Amber Murray’s son. The trial lasted three days. Neither defendant gave evidence. The jury returned guilty verdicts against both and recommended mercy for Sarah. Justice Stephen sentenced them both to death, telling them they had been engaged in "baby-farming in its worst phase and most forbidding aspect."
What the Makins appealed was the admission of the other mothers' evidence. The prosecution had called mothers who had handed babies to the couple, and their evidence, which showed the pair taking in one infant after another for payment, was at the center of the appeals that followed. The appeal in New South Wales was dismissed, and so was a further appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London. The Dibbs government, with the premier, George Dibbs, receiving a deputation, rejected the plea for clemency for John. He was executed at Darlinghurst Gaol in August 1893. Sarah’s death sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life.
The Privy Council’s decision is reported as Makin v Attorney-General for New South Wales, [1894] AC 57, and its reasoning has been quoted in courts and law schools ever since. Speaking for the Committee, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Herschell, set out two linked propositions, quoted in a 1995 article in the Queensland University of Technology Law Journal by Wendy Harris. The prosecution may not lead evidence that the accused has committed other crimes in order to suggest that he or she is the kind of person likely to have committed the crime on trial. But the mere fact that evidence shows other crimes "does not render it inadmissible if it be relevant to an issue before the jury," and it may be relevant if it bears on whether the acts charged "were designed or accidental, or to rebut a defence which would otherwise be open to the accused." Applied to the Makins, the Committee held that the evidence about the other infants could throw light on how the child named in the charge had died, the Sydney barrister Ian Barker QC wrote.
Sarah Makin served about eighteen and a half years at Bathurst, in Sydney and finally at the State Reformatory for Women at Long Bay. Her daughters petitioned for her release in 1907 and in 1911, and on April 29, 1911, she was discharged into the care of one of them because of her great age and failing health. She died in 1918. The case has had its critics. Annie Cossins, a law professor at the University of New South Wales, published a book on the Makins, The Baby Farmers, in 2013, and an article in the Sydney Law Review the same year, titled "The Legacy of the Makin Case 120 Years on: Legal Fictions, Circular Reasoning and Some Solutions." SBS News summarizes her view that the trial was unfair and the evidence lacking.
The colonial setting matters here more than the facts do. Caring for other people’s infants for payment was known at the time as baby farming. In New South Wales there was little regulation of adoption, and unmarried women without work had few choices, SBS News reported in 2020; the City of Sydney’s historian, Laila Ellmoos, told ABC News in 2026 that the practice was not unusual. She noted that another woman, Ellen Batts, had been tried over baby farm deaths in Woollahra three years before, with little press attention. It took a Sydney trial and a ruling from London to turn a local scandal into a rule of evidence that other jurisdictions would apply.
Martha Needle was executed at Melbourne Gaol on October 22, 1894, for the murder of Louis Juncken, a carpenter whose brother she had promised to marry. She was a widow living in Richmond, Melbourne. Her husband and three young daughters had died between 1885 and 1891, each death put down to illness, and no suspicion fell on her at the time, according to the Public Record Office Victoria. After a doctor reported poison in a second Juncken brother in 1894, the deaths of her husband and two of her daughters were examined again, and poison was reported in each, according to State Library Victoria and the Old Treasury Building museum. She was never charged with those deaths. She was charged with the attempted murder of the second brother and the murder of Louis Juncken, and tried only on the second, in September 1894.
The trial is a catalogue of the habits of the time. The jury was made up only of men; women did not serve on juries until the 1920s, as a 2019 InDaily review of Samantha Battams’s study of the case points out. Evidence about the deaths of her husband and daughters was heard at the trial, and Battams argues, in the reviewer’s summary, that the trial was prejudiced by public opinion and coverage before it began, and by evidence that would not be allowed today. Her counsel argued that her spells of unconsciousness meant she could not be held responsible. Her fiancé described fits that came "without warning," when she would "fall suddenly right down." The doctors called would not commit themselves to a diagnosis. Justice Hodges, the same judge who had tried Deeming two years earlier, rejected the plea: "The law cannot wait while philosophers, physicians and scientists settle metaphysical problems," he said, in words the museum quotes. The jury convicted her and made no recommendation to mercy.
Then came the petition. A few days after the trial a lawyer, Marshall Lyle, wrote to the Governor, Lord Hopetoun, on behalf of the Victorian branch of the Howard Association for the Prevention of Crime. The museum, which displayed the letter, summarizes his argument. Her acts, he wrote, were "utterly revolting and opposed to the natural instincts of women," and it was reasonable to assume that a mother accused of killing her own children was insane. He said many women executed in the past had later been recognized as insane, and that Victoria’s prisons held more insane people than officials admitted. He called for proper scientific inquiry and objected that the prison doctor tested her sanity by asking her about the Ten Commandments. Lord Hopetoun passed the letter to the government, and the Attorney-General, Isaac Isaacs, declined to recommend any action. She had been ably defended, he noted, and the petition did not "disclose any facts which would shew that the woman was insane."
The colonial point is in the sequence. The Governor was the formal door to mercy; the Attorney-General, an elected minister, stood behind it, and the plea was handled as a political request and not a judicial one. The Encyclopedia of Melbourne places her execution among three executions of women in a short span in 1894 and 1895, with those of Frances Knorr and Emma Williams, under what it calls a "get tough on crime" policy, and its entry on capital punishment says that of 45 women convicted of capital offenses, five were executed. The question of her sanity was not settled. Her motive for killing Louis Juncken was not established, and no account gives a reason for the deaths in her own family.
Williamina Dean, known as Minnie, took in other people’s babies for money outside Winton, a farming town in Southland, from about 1889. A Supreme Court jury at Invercargill convicted her of murdering one of them, Dorothy Edith Carter, and she was executed at Invercargill on August 12, 1895, aged 50. She is the only woman executed in New Zealand. The government history site NZHistory describes how court cases in Britain and Australia in the 1880s made New Zealanders aware of baby farmers, and how New Zealand newspapers soon began reporting suspected cases within the colony, usually with exaggeration. A Christchurch police survey in 1889 counted more honest caregivers than baby farmers. In 1893 the Commissioner of Police, Arthur Hume, wrote that the "evil" existed in the colony "to a large extent."
Three inquests were held before local juries in May 1895. On Dorothy Carter, the jury returned that she had died of poison administered by Dean. On a second infant, Eva Hornsby, doctors gave the cause as asphyxia, and the jury returned a finding of wilful murder without naming anyone. On a third death, of a boy believed to be Willie Phelan, the jury could not establish the cause, time or place. The legal scholar Sophie Davis concludes that the inquests were procedurally valid by the rules of the time but cites Lynley Hood’s view that they presented Dean to the public as a multiple murderer before any trial had begun. Her lawyer, Alfred Hanlon, asked a judge in chambers to move the trial to Christchurch, arguing that she could not get a fair hearing in Southland. The application was refused. Davis, in a 2015 article in the Victoria University of Wellington Law Review, compares this with the case of Thomas Hall, tried in a poisoning case in 1886, who was granted two changes of venue, and concludes that local prejudice existed but that a move might not have helped, since the coverage was national.
The trial opened at Invercargill on June 18, 1895, before Justice Joshua Strange Williams. Dean faced two charges, the murder of Dorothy Edith Carter and the murder of Eva Hornsby, and the trial proceeded on the Carter charge. The jury, drawn from men aged 21 to 60 living within 20 miles of Invercargill, was sworn after Hanlon had challenged ten potential jurors and the Crown nine. The Crown called 47 witnesses and put in 35 exhibits. Its case on motive was that Dean wanted to avoid the cost of keeping the child and the penalties of the Infant Life Protection Act, under which she was unregistered.
The question of the other infants brought London into a Southland courtroom. The prosecution wanted the jury to hear about Eva Hornsby, to rebut any suggestion that Dorothy’s death had been an accident, and about other children who had passed through Dean’s hands. Hanlon objected that this evidence was unfairly prejudicial. Justice Williams admitted the evidence about Eva as part of the same course of events and on June 20 declined to reserve the question of the other children for a higher court. The leading authority was the Privy Council decision, Makin v Attorney-General for New South Wales, given the year before and, as Davis notes, also concerned with the deaths of infants. It held that evidence of other acts was generally inadmissible but could be admitted to show that a death was designed rather than accidental. Davis records that Hanlon accepted the case was hard to get around. Dean did not give evidence; her lawyers said they could not depend on anything she said unless they knew it to be true independently of her.
Hanlon addressed the jury for about an hour and a half, arguing that Dorothy’s death had been an accident and seeking a manslaughter verdict. The judge’s summing up the next morning leaned strongly toward the Crown. He called a manslaughter verdict "a weak-kneed compromise," and Davis argues that this came close to directing a murder verdict. A judge of that time was allowed to comment on the evidence; Williams had argued publicly in 1894 against limits on that right. The jury was out for about half an hour and convicted her of murder. Because she had been convicted on the Carter charge, the second charge did not proceed.
The appeal followed the machinery of the 1893 criminal law reforms. A judge could note an objection he did not think frivolous, and a convicted person could then seek leave to appeal with the consent of the Attorney-General; appeals in criminal cases were not automatic in New Zealand until 1945. Hanlon obtained the Attorney-General’s consent and applied for leave. The application was heard in Wellington on July 27, 1895, by five judges: Chief Justice Prendergast and Justices Williams, Richmond, Conolly and Denniston. Hanlon could not attend, and Dr. Findlay argued the case for Dean, conceding that the evidence about Eva Hornsby had been admissible but saying that the evidence about other children was not similar enough to be let in. The court refused leave unanimously. Prendergast read the Makin decision as allowing evidence of earlier similar conduct, such as taking in infants for inadequate payment, to be admitted to show design. The decision is reported as R v Dean (1895) 14 NZLR 272. A principle announced in London in 1894 had been applied in a Wellington court within eighteen months of its date.
Mercy lay with the Executive Council, which could advise the Governor to commute a sentence. The New Zealand Police Museum notes that the council had long been reluctant to execute women but considered itself fully justified in Dean’s case, and Premier Richard Seddon’s government declined to commute. Davis sets the decision against earlier cases: Phoebe Veitch’s death sentence was commuted in 1883 after a jury of matrons declared her pregnant, and in 1891 the death sentences of Anna and Sarah Flanagan were commuted to life imprisonment. She argues that the climate of feeling against baby farming, and public anger over the Flanagan commutations, probably weighed on the council. In the weeks before her execution Dean wrote a 49-page account of her life and work. Hood summarizes it in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography: 26 children passed through her care between 1889 and 1895, six of them known to have died. Asked at the end whether she had anything to say, Dean replied, "I have nothing to say, except that I am innocent."
Between the end of 1919 and November 1920, seventeen women were killed in Alexandria. In May 1921 an Alexandria criminal court convicted two sisters, Raya and Sakina Ali Hammam, their husbands and two other men of the murders and sentenced all six to death. Raya and Sakina were executed at Hadra Prison in Alexandria on December 21, 1921. Ten people stood trial in the case brought by the public prosecution. On May 12 the court sent the file to the Mufti of Alexandria for his opinion, as the law then required in capital cases, and the opinion came back on May 15. The verdict was read in public on Monday, May 16, 1921, at the Alexandria Native Court building. Arab News gives the presiding judge as Chief Magistrate Ahmed Bey Musa; the transcription of the judgment, published in 2025 by Counsellor Alber Onsy, does not name the judges.
The colonial frame is the setting, not the bench. The historian Nefertiti Takla, who studied the court files, notes that Britain had occupied Egypt since 1882, declared a protectorate in 1914 and ruled through the war under martial law; the colonial state had licensed and taxed the sex trade since 1882 and required weekly medical examinations, and many women preferred unlicensed work because it paid better and carried less stigma. The husbands worked as manual laborers for the British Army in the second half of the war and returned in November 1919, in the middle of the 1919 revolution against British rule, with curfews and checkpoints in the cities. Takla’s reading is that control over the women in the trade, as much as their jewelry, was the motive. The prosecution and the court treated the motive as robbery.
The judgment is the reason historians say the sisters were sentenced as accomplices. The court held the 17 killings premeditated and said that nothing as cruel had come before the Egyptian courts since they were founded. It held that Raya and Sakina were guilty of complicity by agreement and assistance (Penal Code Articles 40, 41 and related provisions) and that four men, the sisters' husbands Hasaballah Saeed Maraei and Mohammed Abdel Aal and two local strongmen, Orabi Hassan and Abdel Razeq Youssef, were guilty as principals (Articles 194 and related). A goldsmith, Ali, was convicted of receiving stolen property and given five years' imprisonment with hard labor. Three other defendants were acquitted for insufficient evidence. Defense requests for mercy, for a mental examination of one defendant and for a lesser charge for another were refused, and Takla has written that the prosecutor blocked a psychiatric evaluation of Hasaballah.
She found it surprising that the sisters were executed when three other accused accomplices went free. She cites a journalist’s report that the prosecutor had overheard Sakina say that with a life sentence she would be out in fifteen or twenty years and back out, and that he asked the court to cut "these two corrupt members" off from the nation. Elena Chiti of Stockholm University, who studied the coverage in al-Ahram in the autumn of 1920, reported that the national daily built the case in national terms, singled out the sisters, often referred to the men only as "Raya’s husband" and "Sakina’s husband," and condemned the women before trial. Chiti has argued that the sisters were sentenced to death because they were women, not because they were the principal perpetrators, while stressing that this does not make them innocent. Foreign papers carried the story with errors: a wire report printed in the Evening Journal of Wilmington, Delaware, on January 21, 1921, spoke of more than thirty women and claimed that some victims were tourists or daughters of prominent families. Nothing in the court record supports either claim.
At the end Sakina is reported by the prison medical record, as Hannah El-Hitami quotes it in New Lines, to have said that she was a strong woman, that she had killed seventeen women and fooled the government. El-Hitami notes that this contradicts Sakina’s earlier testimony that the men forced her, and that no evidence shows she personally killed anyone; the words may have been defiance rather than a statement of fact.
Michiah Shobek, a handyman from Milwaukee, was executed at Fox Hill Prison, east of Nassau, on October 19, 1976, aged 22. A Bahamian court had convicted him of murdering Irwin Bornstein, a 44-year-old accountant from New York, in January 1974. He had also confessed to killing two other American visitors over the same winter, Paul Howell, a 50-year-old lawyer from Massillon, Ohio, and Katie Smith, a 17-year-old from Detroit. He was never tried for either death. United Press International reported that he was charged with the murders of Howell and Smith as well as Bornstein; William Steel Lofquist, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Geneseo who reconstructed the history of executions in The Bahamas from the Nassau newspapers and archives, writes that only the Bornstein case went to trial. Neither of the other two deaths was ever tried, so in law they remain confessed killings, not convictions. The pattern of trial, appeal and a committee on the prerogative of mercy is the same one that ran through the earlier cases, and Lofquist’s reconstruction draws on the Nassau newspapers, the Department of Archives, Fox Hill Prison records and the British National Archives.
His defense was insanity. In court, according to UPI, he said: "God, my Father, told me who to destroy in Nassau," and he described the three Americans as "Angels of Lucifer." The court convicted him. UPI reported the conviction in 1974; Lofquist gives September 26, 1975, as the date of the death sentence, and the two accounts do not explain the gap. The Tribune of Nassau gave a sentencing date of October 18, 1976, which matches neither. A statement prepared in the White House press office, now in the papers of President Gerald Ford’s press secretary Ron Nessen at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, records that the American Embassy in Nassau had helped him obtain "a prominent Bahamian attorney," who pursued his right of appeal, and that the guilty verdict was affirmed. UPI reported that the appeal court rejected the psychiatric evidence as unconvincing. A year before the execution, UPI reported, his lawyers and the embassy had persuaded the Bahamian government to allow more time for appeals, saving him by a matter of hours; Lofquist writes that the delay followed claims his mother raised about his mental health.
In the month before the execution the Bahamian Minister of Home Affairs, Donald Rolle, announced that the appeals had run their course, and the Committee for the Prerogative of Mercy rejected a plea to spare his life. The mother’s appeal reached the American government. The Ford Library statement records that the embassy had passed to the Bahamian government an appeal made by Shobek’s mother. The Associated Press reported that President Ford had relayed her appeal but was unable to become further involved in Bahamian affairs. On the night before the execution Thomas Cannon, a Legal Aid Society lawyer acting for the family, spent 45 minutes at about midnight on the telephone with the President’s chief of staff, pleading for intervention. The attempt failed. Lofquist sums up the outcome in one line: American authorities refused to intervene. Lofquist counts 86 documented executions in The Bahamas, and records the last as that of David Mitchell, a Haitian, on January 6, 2000.
Lam Kor-wan was a night-shift taxi driver, a quiet 27-year-old who had driven a cab since 1979. Four women died in Hong Kong between February and July 1982. Police spent six months questioning hundreds of people, and Lam was arrested in Kowloon on August 17, 1982. He was tried in the High Court in March 1983. The trial lasted 21 days, Sing Tao reported, and the South China Morning Post reported that the evidence was considered so distressing that a female forensic scientist was taken off the case and only men were allowed to sit on the jury. His father spoke in court. He denied that he was to blame for his son’s crimes, Sing Tao reported, and asked: "Why don’t you say society has a responsibility?" Both accounts describe a violent father, and the Post reports that the court heard he had beaten his son severely as a child.
The jury convicted him of four counts of murder, of the four women: Chan Fung-lan, Chan Wan-kit, Leung Sau-wan and Leung Wai-sum, the last a student of seventeen. On April 8, 1983, the judge sentenced him to death. The detective who obtained his full account, Leung Ping, testified that Lam gave it on the eve of the trial; Sing Tao reports that Leung had built a rapport with him over many interviews, talking with him about the spirit world in which Lam believed. Lam never showed remorse and never apologized to the families, Sing Tao reported in 2023.
The sentence was not carried out. In August 1984 it was commuted to life imprisonment. By then it was settled practice in Hong Kong: since November 1966 the Governor had commuted every death sentence passed, most of them to life imprisonment, Amnesty International recorded in 1993. In April 1993 the Legislative Council voted 40 to 9, with two abstentions, to abolish the death penalty for all crimes. The mercy power that in Victoria in 1894 had been a door briefly held open and then shut had, in Hong Kong in 1984, become a standing policy. The Post, writing when he was 62, reported that Lam was serving his life sentence at Shek Pik Prison, a maximum-security prison on Lantau Island. In 2018 the Correctional Services Department declined to comment on reports that he had been granted parole, and Sing Tao later reported that the department denied them. He was reported still in prison in October 2023.
Four things recur. In Jamaica the rules of evidence kept the testimony of the enslaved out of a murder trial, and a man was convicted of the one killing that admissible evidence could prove. In Victoria and New Zealand the courts sat in a colony whose newspapers had already tried the accused, and the judges said so, or were said by later historians to have failed to; Davis’s article on Dean and the Dictionary entry on Deeming both ask whether a fair jury could have been seated. In Sydney the Privy Council in London took a New South Wales appeal and turned it into a rule that a Southland judge applied within eighteen months and a Wellington court of appeal upheld. And in every jurisdiction mercy ran through an executive: a governor, an executive council, a committee, a standing policy. Needle’s plea failed because the Attorney-General said the petition showed no facts of insanity. Lam’s sentence was never carried out because the Governor commuted every death sentence from 1966 on. Neither decision was a court’s.
• March 16, 1773: Lewis Hutchinson executed at Spanish Town.
• 1832: John Lynch reaches New South Wales on the Dunvegan Castle.
• March 21, 1842: Lynch convicted at Berrima of the murder of Kearns Landregan.
• September 1891: Deeming marries Emily Mather.
• March 11, 1892: Deeming arrested at Southern Cross.
• March 28, 1892: coroner’s jury at Rainhill returns wilful murder against Deeming.
• April 28 to May 2, 1892: Deeming tried in Melbourne; convicted May 2.
• May 9, 1892: Victorian Executive Council confirms the sentence.
• May 19, 1892: Privy Council refuses leave to appeal (Ex parte Deeming).
• May 23, 1892: Deeming executed.
• October 1892: infants' deaths come to light at Macdonaldtown, Sydney.
• March 1893: Sarah and John Makin convicted at Sydney.
• 1893: The Privy Council dismisses the Makins' appeal (reported as Makin v Attorney-General for New South Wales, [1894] AC 57).
• August 1893: John Makin executed; Sarah’s death sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment.
• September 1894: Martha Needle tried and convicted; Lord Hopetoun passes on the mercy petition.
• October 22, 1894: Needle executed.
• May 1895: three inquests in Southland.
• June 18 to 21, 1895: Minnie Dean tried at Invercargill and convicted.
• July 27, 1895: Court of Appeal in Wellington refuses leave (R v Dean).
• August 12, 1895: Dean executed.
• May 16, 1921: Alexandria criminal court convicts Raya, Sakina and four men.
• December 21, 1921: Raya and Sakina executed.
• October 19, 1976: Michiah Shobek executed at Fox Hill Prison.
• April 8, 1983: Lam Kor-wan sentenced to death in Hong Kong.
• August 1984: Lam’s sentence commuted to life imprisonment.
• April 1993: Hong Kong’s Legislative Council votes to abolish the death penalty.