Windeyer’s Justice: An “Unyielding Heel of Iron”[776]
The Mount Rennie trial commenced on Monday 22 November 1886. On the first day of proceedings, 11 young men aged between 17 and 22 years of age[777] stood in the dock of the Central Criminal Court having all been charged with “ravishing and carnally knowing Mary Jane Hicks against her consent”.[778] The matter was heard before his Honour Justice William Charles Windeyer and ran for six full days.
The matter, as recounted in the Central Criminal Court of New South Wales by the Sydney Morning Herald, tells us that Mary Jane Hicks was a domestic servant.[779] On the morning of 9 September 1886, she had set out from her lodging to go to a registry office in Sydney seeking work.[780] She travelled on foot along Sussex Street when she alleged that a cabman approached her and offered her a ride into town.[781] Hicks accepted the ride. She entered the cab but instead of being taken to the agreed location, the cabman took her a couple of miles away to scrubland in Moore Park. It was claimed at the trial that the cabman, Charles Sweetman,[782] then exited the cab and gave her some flowers.[783] He had attempted to have liberties with her when a group of young men appeared on the scene and pulled Hicks from the cab. Charles Sweetman immediately drove away.[784] This group of young men, alleged to have been a gang known as “the push”, then brutally raped Mary Jane Hicks. William Stanley, a shipwright, was walking from Randwick racecourse when he heard Hicks’s screams.[785] He ran in the direction of the screams and attempted to rescue her but was surrounded by three men and was attacked by them.[786] He escaped and ran to the Redfern police station to seek help.[787] Stanley became a key witness in the Prosecution’s case and told the Court that “He need not detail the girl’s story beyond saying that all the prisoners except three violated her in a most brutal manner some even when she was in a semi-conscious state”[788] Thomas Smith, a jockey, was also a key witness.
Smith gave evidence identifying six of the prisoners,[789] whom he claimed to have seen assaulting the victim.[790] The identification of the youths was a key aspect of this case with many of the prisoners claiming that either they had not been present on Mount Rennie at the time or that they had only arrived at the scene after the offence had taken place.Justice Windeyer, appointed to preside over the trial, was regarded as a stern judge who was renowned as possessing "a rigorous and unrelenting sense of retribution that he believed criminal justice demanded".[791] J F Archibald, the editor of The Bulletin, portrayed Windeyer as a brutal member of the bench and part of a dying system of rough colonial justice.[792] Archibald had sat through the entire proceedings of the Mount Rennie case and had taken extensive notes.[793] He later drafted a treatise of the Mount Rennie case drawing on his observations in court during the trial and also on his recollections of the broader circumstances surrounding the case.[794]
J F Archibald clearly disliked Justice Windeyer and the system of brutal colonial justice that this judge represented. During the Mount Rennie trial Archibald was very critical of Justice Windeyer for running the case in a way to suit his own agenda rather than ensuring that justice be done. In particular, Archibald drew attention to the length of the daily sittings adopted by court when hearing this matter.[795] Archibald observed that under the usual hours of court, the court would commence at 10 am.[796] Of the six days it took to hear this case, Archibald recorded that the court sat for the first time on Monday 22 November 1886 between the hours of 10 am until 9:50 pm, Tuesday from 9 am until 11:30 pm, Wednesday 9 am until 7 pm, Thursday 9 am until 7 pm and Friday 9 am until 3:30 am on Saturday morning. The court reconvened five and a half hours later for its final day of sitting on Saturday 27 November 1886 at 9 am until 11:40 pm.[797] These times were also readily confirmed by other newspaper reports on the trial.[798]
Archibald believed that the 7 pm adjournments on the Wednesday and Thursday evenings of proceedings were to accommodate Justice Windeyer’s dinner appointments.
He recalled that “On Friday... [t]he Court, to make up for time expended over the dinner-table. opened at nine, [rather than 10 am] and sat right on night and day until half past three on Saturday morning”.[799] Justice Windeyer was apparently keen to finish the case as quickly as possible as he was shortly to set sail for England.[800] Archibald graphically described the mood of the court in the early hours of Saturday morning:. Counsel, who had vainly implored the judge to adjourn, addressed a comatose jury, up and down whose ranks a bottle of powerful salts was being passed to keep the arbiters of life or death awake. The exhausted and bewildered jury, drawn mainly from a class of men quite unused to protracted mental exertion.[801]
So incensed was Archibald by the Court’s sitting schedule that he later commenced the Sydney version of his piece on the case with the following statement: “And wretches swung that Windeyer might dine”.[802]
The trial ended on Saturday 27 November in spectacular circumstances. Justice Windeyer is documented as taking almost 10 hours to sum up the case before the jury retired at approximately 20 minutes past eight on Saturday evening and returned at approximately 11 pm with its verdict. The jury delivered a guilty verdict upon nine of the 11 youths,[803] but with a recommendation of mercy.[804] Justice Windeyer then took approximately 40 minutes to deliver his sentence upon the nine youths. He sentenced all nine youths to death.[805] The nine condemned youths comprised: William Boyce (19 years), Michael Donnellan (17 years), George Duffy (17 years), William Hill (22 years), George Keegan (19 years), Joseph Martin (17 years), Hugh Miller (18 years), William Newman (18 years) and Robert George Read (19 years).[806] Therefore at the conclusion of the trial at 11:40 pm on Saturday evening, of the 11 youths arraigned, nine had been found guilty.
The cabman had also been found guilty for his part in the crime and was sentenced to 14 years hard labour with two floggings.[807]If these death sentences were carried out, it would be a significant display of might. Executing such a number would see New South Wales going against the declining practice of exercising the death penalty elsewhere in the Colony.[808] Nonetheless, Justice Windeyer was clearly pleased with the jury’s verdict and reportedly stated:
Prisoners, you have been convicted of a most atrocious crime, a crime so horrible that every lover of his country must feel that it is a disgrace to our civilisation. I am glad to find that this case has been tried by a jury that has the intelligence to see through the perjury upon perjury that has been committed on your behalf, and the courage to declare the truth as they see it.[809]
His Honour then imposed a sentence of death by hanging upon each of the prisoners. He is reported to have said, “I warn you to prepare for death. No hope of mercy can I extend to you. Be sure no weakness of the Executive. No maudlin feeling of pity, will save you from the death you so richly deserve”.[810] Archibald later depicted the case in his treatise as a “story... which years ago imprinted upon the legal administration of New South Wales a burning brand of shame that hisses still”.[811]