ABSTRACT
The Examiner published the jury’s petition in full. It condemned the need ‘to award a punishment so manifestly excessive’, ‘respectfully disclaimed the extreme penalty which their verdicts would seem to invoke on the criminals they have had in charge, and earnestly solicited their deliverance’. Hunt endorsed this ‘earnest and temperate proceeding of the London Jury’: ‘The wish of the country is indeed almost unanimous for the abolition of the horrid punishment of death, except for murder’ and went on to condemn the gleeful way in which the Common Serjeant, in the dignitary’s own words, took ‘pleasure’ and ‘satisfaction’ in passing penalty of death. Early in the next month, Hunt published this verse satire on the episode, upon the Common Serjeant’s relish in pronouncing execution (he is portrayed as a bon vivant of death, relishing execution as some men do food) and upon the pitiless English legal system exemplified in the figure of ‘The Dusky Knight’.
