Robert Johnson was an Irish barrister, politician and judge. He sat in the Irish House of Commons and was a judge of the Court of Common Pleas. In 1803 he published a number of venomous attacks on various members of the Irish Government in the form of a series of letters written under the pseudonym "Juverna". After some delay he was identified as the author of the letters. He was prosecuted after some further delay and convicted of seditious libel. He was spared a prison sentence but forced to resign from the Bench, and retired into private life. His motives for writing the Juverna letters are unclear, although he had made a similar anonymous attack on a senior Irish judge, Christopher Robinson, many years earlier.
In 1803 the radical journalist William Cobbett published a series of letters in his weekly newspaperPolitical Register, written by an anonymous author calling himself "Juverna". The name Juverna is a variant of "Hibernia", and was sometimes used by Irish nationalists as a poetic symbol for Ireland. These pamphlets attacked the Irish executive with great venom. They were extremely well-informed about the Irish judiciary, suggesting that the author was himself a judge. Suspicion fell at first on Johnson's colleague in the Common Pleas, Luke Fox, who was noted for his violent outbursts in Court. However in a personal interview with William Downes, 1st Baron Downes, the Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, Fox was able to convince Downes of his innocence. Further inquiries revealed Johnson to be the author; he may have fallen under suspicion because many years earlier he had published a similar attack on a long-serving High Court judge, Christopher Robinson, under another pseudonym. Johnson had few admirers: Daniel O'Connell probably spoke for many when he described him as "dishonest". He pleaded for leniency, but the authorities took a severe view of the matter, and a warrant was issued for his arrest to stand trial in England for seditious libel. Johnson did everything possible to evade prosecution, petitioning each of his judicial colleagues in vain to cancel the warrant. Finally Downes, losing patience, had him arrested. and sent for trial Downes, who was a very stern man, told Johnson that his attempt to evade justice was as serious a matter as the libel itself. After some further delay he was convicted of seditious libel in the autumn of 1805, but was spared a prison sentence. He was forced to resign from the Bench the following year. The rest of his long life was spent in obscurity.
