Bristol Mercury - Saturday, May 11, 1895
This report was originally published in English. Machine translations may be available in other languages.
The Last 24 Hours.
An American correspondent writes to the "Law Journal":—"One feature of the Oscar Wilde case cannot fail to strike American lawyers with considerable force—namely, the withdrawal of Sir Edward Clarke from the case or his withdrawal of the case, whichever it may be deemed. There are very few lawyers in this country who would have had the courage to do that. In the city of my residence a man and his wife were very recently tried for murder, the principal evidence against them being their confessions (corroborated strongly by circumstances), and their counsel were quite generally thought to be in fault for declining to sum up the evidence to the jury and relying exclusively on the legal points raised as to the admissibility of the confessions. The incident in the Wilde case shows to my mind the superior independence of the English to the American lawyer. Sir Edward is highly regarded here, and probably no American lawyer would censure him for his course, but at the same time it would have been a 'fight to the finish,' simply from want of courage to stop."