Considerable astonishment was excited,
some days subsequently to Maguire's pardon, by a statement that, in
the case of the other prisoners included in the verdict, "the law
should take its course." No one credited this declaration for an
instant, and most persons felt that the Crown officials were indulging
in an indecent piece of mockery. Amidst this universal incredulity,
however--this disdainful and indignant disbelief--the prisoners'
solicitor, Mr. Roberts, vigilant and untiring to the last, took the
necessary steps to pray arrest of execution pending decision of the
serious law points raised on the trial. Some of the most eminent
counsel in England certified solemnly that these points were of the
gravest nature, and would, in their opinion, be fully established on
argument before the judges; in which event the conviction would be
legally quashed, independently of the substantial abandonment of it as
false and untenable by the Crown in Maguire's case.
The first idea of the merest possibility--the faintest chance--of
the remaining four men being executed on the vitiated verdict, arose
when it became known that the judges, or some of them, had informally
declared to the government (without waiting to hear any argument on
the subject) that the points raised by the prisoners' counsel were
not tenable, or were not of force.
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