By Bruce Bower
Henry Howard was in big trouble. Down on his luck, the family man stood in the dock of London’s Old Bailey courthouse facing a forgery charge. A Bank of Scotland clerk had just confirmed that a month earlier, on March 14, 1879, Howard bought furniture with a check belonging to someone else. He signed the check with James McDonald’s name.
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With the defense counsel’s blessing, Howard abruptly switched his plea from not guilty to guilty. He begged for mercy to a row of judges. Too late: A forgery conviction bought Howard a year in prison.
Little did the litigated Londoner know that, more than a century later, tech-savvy scholars would consult his case and those of a quarter of a million other Old Bailey defendants. With sophisticated software, historians, philosophers and computer scientists are today probing digitized records of the more than 197,000 Old Bailey trials — some with two or more defendants — that took place from 1674 to 1913.