It has been asked why this objection was not brought forward in an earlier stage of the trial--why it was not pleaded at the very outset, as sufficient to cast the indictment? It has been called a frivolous objection by my Lord Advocate. But many objections were styled frivolous by the gentlemen on that side of the table during the course of this trial, which your Lordships decided to be well founded. My Lords, it was impossible to plead it in this early stage, because the fact came out to be as stated in the objection only during the time that the proof in this trial was led. Though the circumstances might be known to us privately before, yet it was not substantiated by proof, and this surely is the proper time for stating an objection, the grounds of which only appeared in the course of the evidence, and could not possibly appear sooner.
With regard to the matter of fact in this case, I shall not detain your Lordships a moment. Nothing is clearer from the evidence than that there were two separate and distinct houses in which the Excise Office was kept at the time when the robbery was committed. Several of the witnesses have sworn to this, and it was admitted on the other side of the table. I therefore say, my Lords, that this verdict, which has found the prisoners guilty of breaking into the house in which the General Excise Office was kept, finds nothing.
It is in vain to say that these two houses belonged to one and the same office. If they are not under the same roof--which it is confessed these two houses are not--then it is of no importance how near they may be to each other, for neither of them is the house in which the Excise Office was kept, but only one of the houses employed for that purpose. His Grace the Duke of Buccleugh has two houses lying near each other, the house of Dalkeith and the house of Smeiton, both in the parish of Dalkeith. Would the verdict of a jury be good, which, upon the statement of an indictment that the house of the Duke of Buccleugh, lying within the parish of Dalkeith, was broke into, should simply find the pannel guilty? Surely not. It would be necessary to specify which of the houses was broke into, because an innocent man, who could prove an _alibi_ with regard to the one, might not be able to prove it with regard to both, or, in short, because the libel is uncertain.