Emily Best

One night in June of 1898, a woman sent for the police because she heard a baby crying in the street outside her house. Police found the body of a newborn baby in a tub of ashes in the corner of a lane. The Daily News called this "another of those horrible affairs, the murder of a new born infant." The Evening Telegram said there were "details too horrible to mention." Emily Best, a 23-year-old former house maid, was later arrested and charged with murder.

If Emily Best had been found guilty of murder, she would have faced the death penalty. The jury could have reduced the charge to a less serious crime such as infanticide. This usually happened, but in Emily's case it did not. So the court withdrew the charge of murder, and charged Emily with manslaughter instead. Manslaughter is a less serious crime than murder. It means that the person did not intend to cause death. Emily Best pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the advice of her lawyer.

Before her sentence was passed, her lawyer asked for mercy, considering "her youth, the circumstances of the case and her previous good character." She was sentenced to five years in prison. In delivering his sentence, Chief Justice Emerson said this:

According to your own voluntary statement, freely made before the Magistrate, you placed your infant child in an ash tub shortly after its birth. By medical testimony it was shown that the child's mouth, when found, contained ashes and coals, from the effects of which it died. The Crown in its wisdom and clemency has considered that the ends of justice will be met by abandoning the graver charge [of murder] against you, in which your life was involved, and [has] accepted your plea of guilty to the lesser offence of manslaughter...Your council has wisely advised you to plead guilty to the minor offence and I trust...in that time [in prison] you will have opportunity to consider the escape you have made from the due punishment of your offence and that it will enable you to reform your future life.¹⁰

Five years is the longest prison sentence any woman was ever given in Newfoundland for this type of crime. But this case shows that the courts did not want to hang a single woman for killing her newborn baby. That was why the charge of murder was reduced to manslaughter. Emily Best served four years of her jail sentence. She was let out a year early for good behaviour. Perhaps the saddest thing about this case is that Emily seems to have been totally alone, with no one to turn to for help.