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.
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.