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Le désaccord entre Allcock et Powell venait en partie de l’insistance du premier pour qu’on mît en œuvre, dans le Haut-Canada, toute la pompe et la procédure des tribunaux anglais. Le révérend John Stuart, de Kingston, crut d’abord qu’Allcock n’était « pas si rude dans ses manières que le monde se plai[sait] à le supposer ».
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Allcock was, naturally, a decisive judge. John Askin described him at a land claims hearing in 1799 as “a very Impartial good man, but so particular & sticks so close to the law, a very unfits man to act up to the Spirit of the Act”; he added, moreover, that Allcock “did as he pleassed without asking the Sentiments of the othe[r] Commissioners in hardly any case.” The most famous case over which Allcock presided was the trial of John Small* for the murder of Attorney General John White* in a duel. Allcock, who claimed to have been friendly with White, lamented that the solicitor general, Robert Isaac Dey Gray, “failed altogether in adducing positive evidence” of Small’s guilt and the “Jury would presume nothing.” Thus the defendant went free, as was usual in trials arising from duels. In 1803, at the assizes in Sandwich, Allcock sentenced two murderers to be hanged till dead and afterward hanged in chains, evidence that he was not lenient on the bench.
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