John Taylor and George Waters had absconded from the notorious penal settlement at Macquarie Harbour, Van Diemen’s Land’s infamous secondary punishment station for repeat offenders, before turning to highway robbery. Their crime involved robbing soldiers of their arms, a particularly bold offence that ultimately led to their conviction.
Both men were sentenced to death on 2 September 1826 and hanged together at Hobart just eleven days later, on 13 September 1826.
Bushranger James Macpherson, known as the Wild Scotchman, was found guilty at Maryborough of robbing the local mails and sentenced to two concurrent 25-year terms. The presiding judge made clear the sentence was deliberately severe, intended as a warning to deter other would-be bushrangers from following his example.
The punishment stood out for its length even by the standards of colonial Queensland justice, reflecting how seriously authorities viewed the ongoing threat of mail robbery to the colony’s roads and communications.
John Meff was a housebreaker who had already cheated the gallows once, having been convicted and then transported to the colonies rather than executed. But transportation was meant to be permanent exile, and Meff broke its terms by making his way back to England, a crime that under the law of the day carried the same penalty as the original offence: death.
He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to hang for illegally returning from transportation. On 11 September 1721 he was taken to Tyburn and executed at the age of forty, going to the gallows alongside James Redding, who had been condemned separately for robbery.
For Meff the return to Tyburn marked the end of a second chance he could not keep: having once escaped the noose through transportation, the simple act of coming home proved fatal.
William Casey, a young Guardsman only about twenty years old, was hanged in London on 11 September 1721 after being convicted of robbing a man named John Stone in a city park. Casey never accepted the charge; he insisted the confrontation had nothing to do with theft and everything to do with Stone making indecent advances toward him, a claim that, if true, cast the entire prosecution in a very different light.
At the gallows Casey did not simply protest verbally. He left behind a written statement formally proclaiming his innocence of the robbery, a deliberate act by a condemned soldier determined that his version of events would outlive him.
“He maintained until death that the confrontation arose because Stone had made indecent advances toward him” and went to his execution still denying the crime for which he was hanged.
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