Word: podola
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Dates: during 1959-1959
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...nine days the murder trial of Berlin-born Gunther Fritz Podola, 30, was postponed while a London jury considered a plea the like of which had never before been heard in an English court of law (TIME, Sept. 21). The plea: in "the very severe fright" caused by the violence of his arrest, Podola had lost his memory, and so was unfit to plead to the charge of shooting a London cop. Last week, after a procession of experts had offered conflicting medical opinion on whether Podola was, in fact, suffering from "hysterical amnesia," the jury finally decided that...
Next day, when the full trial finally got under way, Podola coolly persisted in his disclaimer: "I do not remember the crime for which I stand accused ... I am unable to answer the charges." The jury spent only 38 minutes in arriving at a verdict of guilty. Covering his wig with the dread black cap, Judge Edmund Davies slowly told Podola: "You have been convicted on evidence of the most compelling character and certainty of the capital murder* of a police officer by shooting him down in the prime of his manhood. For that foul and terrible deed...
Before anyone else in the courtroom could move, Gunther Podola turned calmly away and stepped quickly and surely down the steps from the dock to the cells below. Faithful to the last to his profession of emotional shock and indifference, he showed no sign of realizing that he had just been sentenced to die on the gallows...
...week's end the Crown called Dr. Francis Busby, senior medical officer at Brixton Prison, who pronounced Podola's amnesia "definitely not genuine," and insisted that if Podola's memory really had vanished he could not have played chess and vingt-et-un with his guards without first being shown how. Podola, he said, had "deceived" Edwards and other doctors who held that he was not fit to be tried...
This week, after further testimony, Podola's twelve jurors, battered by diametrically opposed medical opinion, must make up their minds whether he is capable of participating in his own defense. If they decide that he is, he will go forward lo a trial that could end in his execution. If not, for the first time in British history, a man will escape the law's clutches on the ground that he has forgotten the crime charged against...