Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 4, 2025
Formerly all felonies were punishable with death, and, in the words of Mr Justice Blackstone, "the law allows many pleas by which a prisoner may escape death; but only one plea in consequence whereof it can be inflicted, viz., the general issue, after an impartial examination and decision of the facts, by the unanimous verdict of a jury."
In the last year of his reign comes the great Statute of Monopolies noted in the last chapter, and an act extending the benefit of clergy to women convicted of small felonies, for which they had previously suffered death, and another act for the repression of drunkenness.
"But no magistrate is obliged to admit to bail in felonies and misdemeanours, and in practice bail is never allowed in cases where as in this case the charge is one of murder. Such procedure is unheard of." "Make a precedent, then!" sneered Mallalieu. "Here! you can have twenty thousand pounds security, if you like."
It has been said that there was a considerable sum of money due to him for his share in the apprehension of several felonies at the very time of his death, which happened, as I have told you, at Tyburn, on Monday, the 24th day of May, 1725; he being then about forty-two years of age.
Supposing she overslept herself, and Tommy found her there in the morning when he went for his tools? Supposing my landlord, Mr. Ledbury, who was a magistrate, found out I had harboured a criminal, and gave me notice just when I had repapered the parlour and put in a new back to the kitchen range? Such a calamity was unthinkable. What happened to people who compounded felonies?
They opened the ballot box and jury box to thousands of white men who had been debarred from them by a lack of earthly possessions. They introduced home rule into the South. They abolished the whipping post, the branding iron, the stocks and other barbarous forms of punishment which had up to that time prevailed. They reduced capital felonies from about twenty to two or three.
But call it a hundred thousand. It is a body that seventy millions of people ought to take care of with little difficulty. And we certainly ought to stop its increase. But we do not. The class grows every day. Those who watch the criminal reports are alarmed by the fact that an increasing number of those arrested for felonies are discharged convicts.
I will only add that the methods at Elmira have passed far beyond the experimental stage in this matter. The necessary effect of the adoption of the indeterminate sentence for felonies is that every State prison and penitentiary must be a reformatory. If he is incapable of reform, he must stay there for his natural life. He is a free agent.
The practice of magic, sorcery, and spells, in the reality of which all ignorant communities have believed, had long been a criminal offence in England. A statute of the thirty-third year of Henry VIII made them capital felonies.
Many crimes, which in England are classed as felonies, have been statutorily reduced to misdemeanours in Ireland so as to limit the right of challenge possessed by the accused from twenty jurors to six, and at the same time, after Lord O'Hagan's Act had withdrawn from the sheriff the power of preparing jury lists, which he used for political purposes; by resuscitating a common law right of the Crown which has not been used in England for fifty years, arbitrarily to order jurors to "stand aside," the provisions of O'Hagan's Act have been evaded, and a panel hostile to the accused is most frequently secured.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking