The Reminiscences of Sir Henry Hawkins, Baron Brampton

I knew pretty well where to begin–which is a great point, I think, in advocacy–and began in the right place. I must repeat that the prisoner boldly asserted, when the evidence was given as to the finding of his cap close to the spot where the outrage was committed, that it was his cap, but that he had not worn it on that night, having lent it to one of the other men, whom he then named. This was, to my mind, a very important point in this second trial, and I made a note of it to assist me at a later period of the case. If this was true, the strong corroboration of the keeper’s evidence of identity was gone. Indeed, it went a good deal further in its value than that, for it may have been the finding of the prisoner’s cap that induced the belief that the man whose face he saw was the prisoner’s!