John Charles Day
English judge
Sir John Charles Frederick Sigismund Day (20 June 1826 – 13 June 1908) was amongst the first Catholic judges in England to be appointed after the English Reformation, the first being William Shee. He was also known as a collector of paintings, including several works by James McNeill Whistler.
Biography
Born at The Hague, son of Captain John Day and his wife Emilie (née Hartsinck), Day completed his schooling at Downside, and, as the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge were at that time inaccessible to Catholics, obtained his BA from the University of London in November 1845.
He was admitted as a student in the Middle Temple in 1845, was called to the Bar, and became a judge in June 1882. He was well known for sentencing criminals to lashes. In his latter years, he would sometimes listen to cases with his eyes closed, listening intently, and opening an eye suddenly if something significant were said. Colleagues jocularly referred to this as "the peep of Day".
He was one of the judges who sat on the Parnell Commission. At the time it was said that it was on his insistence that early proof was tendered of the authenticity of the letters attributed to Parnell, which forced Richard Pigott into the witness box and led to the collapse of that part of the case.
He resigned from the High Court of Justice in 1901, when he was granted an annuity of £3,500.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Charles Day” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.