Judicial Blunder

In a makeshift courtroom, surrounded by barbed wire and police with Sten guns, sat the two bewigged and red-robed justices of the Kenya supreme court. Spectators in the courtroom were searched for guns. Hundreds of armed police and settlers strolled the streets of the remote little town of Kitale. The court was met to hear the appeal of Moscow-trained Jomo ("Burning Spear") Kenyatta and five of his loyal followers, sentenced to seven years' hard labor last April for being the brains behind the Mau Mau terrorist movement.

Defense Attorney D. N. Pritt, a Londoner who makes a specialty of defending Communist causes, ticked off 60 grounds of appeal for Kenyatta, at least 20 for each of his associates. When he finished, the two judges threw out the convictions on one of the technicalities raised by Barrister Pritt: Chief Judge Ransley Thacker, the trial magistrate, had no jurisdiction in the isolated village of Kapenguria, where the trial took place, because his appointment was to a different province of the colony. The government had blundered, the court held, but Kenyatta and his cronies must stand trial again. Up jumped Defense Attorney Pritt to protest that "a new trial . . . would be vexatious and oppressive . . . The government is unfortunately to blame for this appalling waste of time . . . for a trial which did not in fact exist." The defendants, he said, could not afford another trial.

Calmly, the two Supreme Court judges replied: "The nature of the charges . . . is particularly grave. If they are guilty, they ought not to escape the consequences of their acts."

Outside the courtroom, in the hot Kenya sun, bearded, burly Kenyatta and his five followers were taken into custody once more. In South Nyeri, Mau Mau terrorists had just killed 13 loyal Kikuyu. In London, British Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton told Laborite critics in the House of Commons that, in Britain's relentless and increasingly successful counter-efforts, 1,300 suspected Mau Maus have been killed.

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