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MAGUS

45 on the field. The clothes on the upper part seemed as if pinned round it; but those on the lower part were put on as they had been worn’. To Mr Blacker – ‘The body lay in the ditch with the face up. I did not find internal marks to occasion death. If the child had been exposed to the inclemency of the air, for a short time, it would probably have died after the infliction of the injuries. The wound betwixt the eyes was not a superficial one. The blood was effused into all the structured down to the bone which was injured but not broken. In the other wounds the blood was also effused into all the structures. I thought the wounds the only visible cause of death’. John Reavey – ‘I live in Portadown. In April last I heard of a man’s having killed a child at Armagh. I saw a person matching the description passing through Portadown and gave information to the Captain of Police who ordered a party of his men to go with me. The man I refer to was the prisoner. When he saw us, he escaped into Mr Shillington’s timber but was captured on the Lurgan Road. He told Capt. Locke that he lived in High Street, Newry. I saw him again in the police barrack. Capt. Locke warned him not to say anything that might commit himself. My brother and I, Mick Cromey and Corporal Daly of the police were present with him in the barrack afterwards. Mick Cromey and my brother asked him why he had killed the child. We could not get him stopped from declaration of the facts. He gave himself two or three names – one of which was Turley. I also said he had been bred in Sheepbridge’. John Wilson, Sub-Constable – ‘It was I who arrested the prisoner. I found him lying in a Mr Boyd’s garden, at the end of Portadown, on 27th April. I told him there was a charge against him and asked him where he lived. He said in Newry, or its neighbourhood. He denied that he ever lived at Armagh’. Mr Blacker, for the defence, argued that the evidence did not bear out the second count of the indictment, alleging strangulation as the cause of death; and quoted from Sir George Lewin’s reports in support of his argument. He also submitted, as to the first count, charging the death as occasioned by throwing the deceased down on the ground &c. thereby giving him a mortal wound, that it did not appear in the evidence of the surgeon whether the mortal wound was occasioned by a blow or by a fall to the ground; and he referred to a precedent given in the work already referred to, to show that this would not be sufficient to sustain the count.

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