British Justice

Windsor's police were peacock proud. The "Slasher," who had knifed two men to death and stabbed three others, had been caught. Or so they thought last July. When they jailed Ronald George Sears, 18, a good-looking, moody youth, he had no police record, but after $3,000 in rewards were offered, a kitchen knife found in one of the Slasher's victims was identified by Sears's sister-in-law as having come from Sears's house. That seemed to be enough, though other members of the family knew nothing about the knife.

In jail, Sears was questioned for seven hours. Police wouldn't let his father see him, didn't give him anything to eat. At first, he denied the stabbings. But he finally made a confession, with homosexual trimmings out of Krafft-Ebing (TIME, July 22). On the strength of that confession, he was tried for the murder of one Hugh Price, convicted, and sentenced to be hanged. Last week Windsor's police wished they had not been in such a hurry.

The five judges of Ontario's Court of Appeal reviewed the case at Toronto, held their noses at the third-degree methods used on Sears. The judges didn't think that Sears's "confession" was "voluntary." "I go further," said one. ". . . This is not British justice." Another wondered that anyone "could kill so many people without getting blood on his clothes. I'm surprised that the boy's mother wasn't [called to] the witness box to give evidence about this." They pointed out that Sears was apparently questioned so rigorously after his arrest that he collapsed and "was so seriously ill they sent for a doctor." They thought that some aspects of the case were "ridiculous," "disturbing," "suspicious" and "fantastic."

Last week, just 14 days before he was to have been executed, the court unanimously voided Sears's conviction. It was the same thing as acquittal, at least on the Price murder charge. Sears might still be charged with the other murder, or the stabbings, if the police thought that they could salvage admissible evidence. But Ronald Sears was not worried. As he was moved out of the death cell in Windsor's jail he said to his mother, "See, Ma, I told you not to worry; everything is going to be all right."

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