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before this Court, weak as it is with one on the whole record is open to my decision. Mr Pollard then opened the Demurrer. Judge only, considering the undue influence on his judgment which such a Having enumerated a number of propositions, and having cited cases from the earliest times to the present, he objected at other points to the second plea as being too general. He cited cases in which a crime was charged in the libel, and he contended that the specific charge must be made as if the libelled person were on his trial for the offence. It seems to me that the doctrine, with curious illustrations in Stark on Libel 236, is according to the cases where by the libel an indictable offence is charged.
With reference to the statements which the Attorney General made in that letter, as he had not been present he could write only from information given to him, and as to which I only think he has been misinformed, when he treated as a favour to him, that apply where the libel does not impute an offence nor even then when the Defendant had been allowed to plead such Plea of Justification, whereas the Acting Attorney General had expressly admitted it to be the Defendant's right so to plead. And as to costs, they on more than one occasion were admitted on both sides to necessarily follow the event by force of Ordinance No. 4 of 1857. How with Lord Mansfield's dictum (Sir W. Black. 514) before him he could as in that letter he said he should do, and as he did, give a locus standi to the counsel of any private prosecutor or complainant I am at a loss to conceive,
my declining to hear him otherwise read as the nature of the case will admit, and reading the plea in a plain common sense way, I think that in an ordinary case and pro forma in the prosecution.
I feel that the reading this letter in Court was unconstitutional and that it has greatly increased my difficulties. It is the expression of the views of the Attorney General, and of him alone, and I will not consider it in whatever terms expressed as expressing any opinion much less decision by the Executive, who ought not constitutionally to have been mixed up by the Attorney General in the question before me. The Attorney General, and he only, is responsible for the conduct or discontinuance of every ex officio Information, for it is he who prosecutes and he alone ought to appear or can be recognized by this Court in it.
The words of, I think, Cowper recurred to me "We murder to dissect." I had understood the plea as meaning something as a whole; thus dissected, it was a dead body without sense or meaning. Mr Pollard's most serious attack on this plea was this, that whereas it appeared to profess to be a denial of the use of the words with the meaning imputed to them, and a justification of them as true in their natural sense with that sense explained by the Defendant's own innuendoos, according to the form set out in Bull & Leake 2nd edit. (1862) page 613, Mr Pollard was the fortunate possessor of the only copy of a patent third edition of the same work (1868) just arrived.
It was admitted that every point...
But
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the consideration to inform This passage is inexplicable - Shad
the Court of the course which as Attorney General on my return to the Colony & proposed to take with the approval of the Executive in respect to this troublesome case which had been hung up for many months awaiting my return and for that my official conduct is publicly stigmatized as unconstitutional and discourteous.