On this last, tumultuous day of the trial of Myles Joyce, the defendant sought out my face as he entered the courtroom. When he found it, he smiled more broadly than he had before. He had given me my commission. He had said, in effect, I can face the end of this foolishness so long as you take care of my wife and child.On what grounds, I wondered? Had he seen me watching her at the eerie wake by the Church on the Hill? Had my mouth fallen open with awe when she tried to resist his arrest? Or had he merely decided that I was a nice, honest-seeming young American who could be counted on to accept his gift and demand.
I shivered at the challenge he had given me.
Tom Casey was a slippery witness. He said everything in response to the questions of both Crown and Defense that the Crown wanted. Yet, he gave the Defense certain openings on which they might have seized. Again, he raised the names of the mysterious eleventh and twelfth men, Nee and Kelly. He claimed that it was a fine, clear night, but quite dark by the time of the murder.
A juror interjected a question. Who were the three men who forced the door and entered the house? He had apparently missed the point that the Crown has subtly changed the number of murderers from three to five.
Casey replied, “There were five in the house, the two men already convicted, Kelly and Nee, and the present defendant.”
“Whom you could see despite the darkness?” Defense Counsel Malley demanded.
“Yes.”
“Five will get you ten,” Martin Dempsey whispered to me, “that he was one of those inside himself.”
I had not thought of that. Perhaps that suspicion would be useful later.
“He has said as much repeatedly,” Mr. Justice Barry snapped.
“Yes, m’lord.”
“Did you count the number of shots that were fired, Mr. Casey?”
“I believe I counted nine, sir.”
“Nine!”
“Yes, sir.”
“I believe that Anthony Joyce testified he didn’t hear any shots.”
“I can’t help that, sir. There were at least nine shots fired. All of the men who went into the house had guns.”
A constable had previously testified that the Royal Irish Constabulary had found nine bullets, three of them in the bodies of victims.
“He said nine,” Mr. Justice Barry intervened. “Stop badgering him.”
There was no point in pursuing the contradictions in the testimony against Myles Joyce. He was doomed.
Murphy received another standing ovation for his summation. Several of the jurors slept through Malley’s.
The key hint in the Judge’s charge to the jury were
words I scribbled down: “Gentlemen of the jury, notwithstanding the difficulties suggested by the able and eloquent counsel who addressed you on behalf of the prisoner at the bar, I feel confident that you will discharge the duty imposed upon you at once with firmness and accuracy.”
“Ignore the defense’s arguments and find them guilty,” I said to Martin Dempsey.
“He hardly had to tell them that, boyo.”
The jury was out six minutes. Thus did English law mete justice to Irish-speaking chieftains. Not for the first time.
The clerk asked Myles whether he wished to reply to the verdict. Not having understood the words (though he must have known its meaning) he continued to stare at the Judge.
The interpreter was asked to explain the sentence.
Suddenly the bored, resigned man was transformed. His face began to glow, his eyes to shine. He spoke in fluid, musical Irish, slowly, confidently, and with enormous power. He gestured easily and smoothly, a druid or a priest or maybe both. Or maybe a king bidding farewell to his loyal people. Could Moses coming down from Sinai, I wondered, have made more of an impression in the courtroom? No one stirred, few had the courage to look at him, everyone knew that, even if they did not understand the words, this was the plea of violated innocence.
The translator strove to capture his meaning:
“He says that by the God and the Blessed Virgin above him that he had no dealings with it any more than the person who was never born, that against anyone for the past twenty years he never did any harm, and if he did, that he may never go to heaven, that he is as clear of it as the child not yet born, that on the night of the murder, he slept in his bed with his wife, and that he has no knowledge about it whatever. He says he is quite content with
whatever the gentlemen may do with him, and that whether he is hanged or crucified, he is as free and as clear as can be!”
Later, an Irish-speaking reporter told us that the interpreter had not come even close to capturing the fervor and the beauty of Myles Joyce’s last words in the court. Won’t they be reciting them in poems and songs for a thousand years, he promised.
I understood for the first time why Nora loved him.
If the passion, the musical beauty, the grandeur of what Myles said had an impact on Mr. Justice Barry he did not show it. He shuffled among his papers, found his prepared sentencing speech and recited it as though Myles Joyce had not suddenly transformed himself, the courtroom, and the trial.
“Myles Joyce, after a most careful trial, you have been convicted of a crime committed under circumstances of aggravation so dreadful that I do not care again to recapitulate them. Although an opportunity has been afforded you of addressing the court in that language which is more familiar to you than any other, (clearly Barry thought that Myles, at least, understood English), yet, you have informed us that you understand what I am saying, and if I refrain from making observations to you on the enormity of your guilt and the fearful position into which that guilt has now brought you, it is because I cannot but feel that to address such subjects to a man who went out at the bidding of some unknown, unseen authority, to slaughter his own cousin and that cousin’s family—to address, I say, upon topics such as I referred to a man guilty of that crime, it would be indeed a waste of language and an assumption of a possibility of weight and authority, that I do not pretend on such subjects to possess.
“I believe no piece of evidence ever given in a court of justice produced a greater impression than that statement of the witness, Anthony Joyce, yesterday elicited by
one of the jury, when he announced the fact that the witness against you, this respectable, honest, truth-telling man, you, the convicted murderer and the man the head of the house whom and whose family you slaughtered, were all united by ties of blood of the closest kind. It has communicated a peculiar significance, I may say, a peculiar horror to this case, that such a state of society should exist in that apparently primitive and remote part of the country—that, at the bidding of this unknown authority, as I have said, you should go out without remonstrance or hesitation to do that work of slaughter upon the young woman, who, perhaps, above all others in the community you should have stood up to protect.
“It only remains for me now to perform, for the third time during this commission, the dreadful duty of condemning my fellow man to doom. It is a dreadful duty, and I am not ashamed or afraid to own that I feel it to be so. But, if there were a case in which feelings of distress or pain or hesitation at the performance of that duty should sink into abeyance, it is in a case like yours, where the guilt has been so enormous, without a particle, even a shadow of any mitigating or even reasoning circumstances connected with it, to justify, I cannot, of course, say to justify it, but even to palliate or excuse your dreadful act.”
Mr. Justice Barry then put on his black cap.
“The sentence of this court is, and I do adjudge and order, that you, Myles Joyce, be taken from this court, the place where you now stand, and that you be removed to Her Majesty’s jail in Galway, and that on Friday, the fifteenth day of December next, you be taken to the common place of execution, within the walls of the said prison, and that you there and then be hanged by the neck until you be dead, and that your body be buried within the precincts of the prison in which you were confined
after your conviction, and may the Lord have mercy on your soul.”
Myles remained standing rock-stiff in the dock in total incomprehension of those lofty sentiments of the learned Judge. He deliberately reached over for his hat and then turned slowly away, and with a step, lingering and sorrowful, and a heavy sigh with which there was an indistinct exclamation in Irish, audible only to a portion of the courthouse, he left the courtroom.
Quite by chance I encountered Mr. Justice Barry as he was leaving the courthouse.
“Mr. Justice Barry,” I said briskly.
“Er, yes, son?”
“Myles Joyce will have no need of God’s mercy. Someday you will. May God have mercy on your vile soul.”
He gasped and ran away from me.
How childish can I be!
It is finished now, save for possible appeals. The five remaining prisoners appeared in court this morning and pleaded guilty. They were sentenced to death, but their case was submitted to the executive committee of the court with the understanding that the sentence would be commuted to twenty years in prison. While Myles Joyce was declaring his innocence before God, Jesus, and the Blessed Mother, George Bolton was in jail in the basement of the courthouse browbeating-with the help of a priest and the Solicitor for the Defense—the men who had yet to be tried to make a guilty plea. The journalists here have learned that only one of the five, a sixty-year-old man named Michael Casey, was in fact in the raiding party. The others were victims of either the malice or the ignorance of Anthony Joyce. It had taken only eight days for the Maamtrasna trial. George Bolton, Crown Solicitor
for Limerick had wrapped it all up in a neat little package.
What was the score? Only three (perhaps only two, if one grants Pat Casey the benefit of the doubt) of the accused had actually participated in the crime. One innocent man (and perhaps two) had been condemned to death. Four innocent men would spend twenty years in prison. Two men, one of them—Tom Casey—perhaps guilty, had won their freedom by lying to save their skins.
If one counts Pat Joyce and Pat Casey (both sentenced to death) and probably Tom Casey as actual killers, then three of the five murderers were still at large, perhaps including the mysterious and sinister Nee and Kelly.
The Crown had convicted seven completely innocent men and one guilty outside observer. Three killers were still free to wander the lanes of Connemara.
That will be the theme of my dispatch tonight.