Thomas Picton

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Thomas Picton : biography

1758 – 18 June 1815

Picton joined Hood in military operations in St Lucia and Tobago, before returning to Britain to face charges brought by Fullarton. In December 1803 he was arrested by order of the Privy Council and promptly released on bail set at £40,000 (Picton was able to give surety for half of this; two West Indies plantation owners covered the remainder).

The majority of the charges against Picton were dealt with by the Privy Council. They related principally to excessive cruelty in the detection and punishment of practitioners of obeah, severity to slaves, and of execution of suspects out of hand without due process. Only the latter class of charge seems to have seriously worried the Privy Council, and here Picton’s argument that either the laws of Trinidad, then still the laws of the former Spanish colonial power, or ‘the state of the garrison’ justified the immediate execution in the cases specified eventually carried the day.This was not a foregone conclusion, nor unimportant to Picton: one of the cases was the execution without trial or court-martial of a British soldier for desertion and rape; in the same period, the former military commander of Gorée was publicly hanged for having a soldier flogged to death without a court-martial

He was, however, tried in the court of King’s Bench before Lord Ellenborough in 1806 on a single charge; the misdemeanor of having in 1801 caused torture to be unlawfully inflicted to extract a confession from Luisa Calderon, a young free mulatto girl suspected of assisting one of her lovers to burgle the house of the man with whom she was living, making off with about £500. Torture (but not the specific form) had been requested in writing by a local magistrate and approved in writing by Picton. The torture applied ("picketing") was a version of a British military punishment and consisted in principle of compelling the trussed up suspect to stand on one toe on a flat-headed peg for one hour on many occasions within a span of a few days. In fact Luisa was subjected to one session of 55 minutes, and a second of 25 minutes the following day.After confessing, she was held for another 18 months before being released: under English law, if found guilty, she would have been eligible to be hanged.

The period between Picton’s return and the trial had seen a pamphlet war between the rival camps, and the widespread sale of engravings showing a curious British public what a personable 14-year-old mulatto girl being trussed up and tortured in a state of semi-undress might look like. The legal arguments, however, revolved on whether Spanish law permitted torture of suspects: on the evidence given,by/for the prosecution: Picton’s lawyers don’t seem to have anticipated this point being moot, but to have expected arguments on whether a British governor could/should apply Spanish law in matters where it was contrary to basic precepts of English law the jury decided that it did not and Picton was found guilty.

Picton promptly sought a retrial, which he got in 1808. At this, other credible witnesses were brought forward by Picton’s supporters to testify to the (Spanish) legality of torture, its application in the recent past, and that Luisa Calderon had been old enough to be legally tortured. The jury reversed the verdict of the earlier trial but asked for the full court to consider the further argument of the prosecution that torture of a free person was so repugnant to the laws of England that Picton must have known he could not permit it,Torture of slaves was permitted in most of the British West Indies, as indeed was their summary execution for a number of reasons- for example having attempted to resist arrest. whatever Spanish law authorised. (The full court never reached a decision on this; there were legal precedents to this general effect from the British occupation of Minorca—and a practical precedent from the British seizure of the Cape of Good Hope from the Dutch, but it remained to demonstrate that Picton should have known this, and by now Fullarton was dead and Picton a war hero.)