Smuggling & Smugglers in Sussex - online book

An Account of a notorious Smuggling gang in the early 18th Century

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48
SUSSEX SMUGGLERS.
from him that was aimed at to him that received the blow and died by it. And consequently, in the case I have just put, the person who discharged the gun being-guilty of murder, all his accomplices are involved in his guilt; because the gun was discharged in prosecu­tion of their common engagement, and it is therefore considered as the act of the whole party.
" What I have hitherto said regards those who are present in the sense I have mentioned, and abetting the fact at the time of the commission of it. But there are others who may be involved in the same guilt, I mean the accessaries before the fast. These are all people who by advice, persuasion or any other means, procure the fact to be done, but cannot be said, in any sense, to be present at the actual perpetration of it.
" These persons are involved in the guilt, and liable in the case of wilful murder to the same punishment as the principal offenders are.
"I am very sensible, gentlemen, that I have been something longer than I needed to have been, if I had spoken barely for your information. But on this occasion I thought it not improper to enlarge on some points, that people may see the infinite hazard they run by engaging in the wicked combinations I have mentioned : and how suddenly and fatally they may, being so engaged, be involved in the guilt of murder itself, while perhaps their principal view might fall very short of that crime."
His lordship having ended his charge, two bills of indictment were presented to the grand jury, one for the murder of William Galley, sen., a custom-house officer in the port of Southampton, and the other for the murder of Daniel Chater, of Fordingbridge, in the county of Hants, shoemaker; when, as soon as the
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