which left an innocent man under the suspicion that there might have been something in the talk of mass murder after all". Stevenson was of the opinion that had he been allowed to, he "could have successfully prosecuted Adams on six murder counts". Journalist Rodney Hallworth reports that Stevenson said of Adams' decision not to give evidence in court "I firmly believe justice is not served by the present law. It should be possible for the prosecution to directly examine an accused ... It was a clear example of the privilege of silence having enabled a guilty man to escape." In Stevenson's opinion Adams "was so incredibly lucky to have literally got away with murder". Judicial career Stevenson was appointed a High Court judge on 1 October 1957, and (as is traditional) was knighted a few days later. From 1958 until 1960, he was a member of an Inter-Departmental Committee on Human Artificial Insemination. For the first four years of his judicial career Stevenson was assigned to the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division, after which he was transferred to the Queen's Bench Division, where he presided over criminal cases. He then began to attract press attention. Known for his outspokenness, Stevenson described one case as a "pretty anaemic kind of rape", because the victim was the accused's ex-girlfriend and had been hitch-hiking, before sentencing the man to a two-year suspended sentence. To a man acquitted of rape, he remarked "I see you come from Slough. It is a terrible place. You can go back there." In similar vein he told a husband involved in a divorce case that his decision to live in Manchester was "a wholly incomprehensible choice for any free man to make". Following a 1964 parallel of his comments in the wake of the Bodkin Adams case, Stevenson attracted criticism for his summing up to the jury in the case of Ryan: The academic lawyer Rupert Cross described Stevenson's pronouncement as "gibberish", and to the Court of Appeal in 1977 it seemed that Stevenson had made a distinction "without a difference". Although Stevenson's direction was not in accordance with the law in 1964, Parliament introduced a form of caution under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 that reflects what he proposed. His earlier suggestion that defendants in criminal trials should be forced to answer prosecution questions has not been adopted. Stevenson believed that it was the