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Updated: May 8, 2025
This law of court cabal and of party, this mens quaedam nullo perturbata affectu, this law of complexion, ought not to be endured for a moment in a country whose being depends upon the certainty, clearness, and stability of institutions. Now I come to the last substitute for the proposed bill, the spirit of juries operating their own jurisdiction.
As a judge he was eminently successful, his decisions having been overruled by higher courts only in a single instance, and that owing to a clerical mistake. In politics he was evidently not at home. After leaving the bench, Judge Andrews returned to the practice, but has been chiefly employed as associate counsel, occasionally addressing juries on important cases.
Land tax and direct taxes were to be voted only for a year, indirect taxes might be imposed for several years. No levy of men for the army nor any exchange of territory was to be made but by a law. Taxes were to be proposed by the Chamber of Representatives. Ministers to be responsible. Judges to be irremovable. Juries to be established.
Nevertheless, the law permits experts to give their opinions to juries, who often have nothing except those opinions to control their decisions, and who naturally give them in favor of the side which is supported by the greatest number of experts, or by experts of the highest repute.
The juries, carefully selected by Sheriffs whom the Crown had named, were men animated by the fiercest party spirit, men who had as little tenderness for an Exclusionist of a Dissenter as for a mad dog.
Sir John's reply was non-committal, but not wholly discouraging. It conceded the advantages resulting from a free and well-conducted press, but expressed reverence for trial by jury, and referred to the danger of interfering with the verdicts of juries or the opinions of Judges unless their illegality could be clearly demonstrated.
If at the assizes all the jurors summoned were collected into one large jury, and if they all voted Guilty or Not Guilty on all the cases, after a trial in which all the counsel were heard and all the witnesses were examined simultaneously, verdicts would indeed no longer depend on the accidental composition of the separate juries; but the process of forming verdicts would be made, to a serious degree, less effective.
As I said in one of my three letters from prison: "For the first time juries have disagreed, and chances are already slightly against a verdict of Guilty. Now the jury is the hand by which the enemy grasps us, and when we have absolutely secured the twelfth man we shall have amputated the thumb."
To maintain these accusations, he would have to overawe into an active participation in his crime, judges, juries, peers, the dearest relations of those whom he was destroying, and this with no standing army, no prætorians or janissaries at his back, with no force but the yeomen of the guard, who could be scattered by a rising of the apprentices.
It is not the objectionable form of punishment previously described for it encourages the man to put forth his best effort to improve, and substantially rewards these efforts, even to granting him his liberty if he persevere with them. Punishment by death is becoming more and more unpopular. The dislike of juries to bring in a verdict of "guilty" in a murder case is sufficient testimony to this.
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