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The same thing may still be said of the oath
of sincerity with which this unanimity is preceded:
though this also is frequently dwelt upon as a
very
spiritual and very happy circumstance; It
is from the combination of these happy circumstances
with the two preceding ones that an English Jury
as at present constituted and for ages used up by
English lawyers, may be defined with indefensible
truth <add>accuracy
</add> a body of occasional Judges from whom the</del> law
has brought together in order to constrain them
by torture to give a false judgment over
by Perjury.
Note to p. 9. continued.
The Law Common Law of England has been
much magnified for its supposed humanity magnanimity in rejecting
the use of torture: the plain truth is, that, refusing
to apply it to the any of the very few and good purposes it has been applied
to by other nations, she has all along applied been applying
it to useless purposes and to bad ones.+ +It was never applied employ'd to obtain of the known guilty a direction to an indication of their known accomplices.
It was till
lately appliedemploy'd to force a culprit to comply with
an useless formality: formantory it is to this Law applied
to load an unknown twel proportion of twelve innocent men with unnecessary
guilt.
Oh what Fiction was applied in this shows
how insupportable it is.
But why, says somebody, thus mention torture? as
if any the memory of man could favour furnish an instance of
any thing that ever deserved that name. I answer: Because
men must and would fall continually under its gripe, if perjury
did not afford them a secure and constant refuge. Would
the rack be the less a rack, because it had never been
known to be exhibited in vain?
Identifier: | JB/035/047/004 "JB/" can not be assigned to a declared number type with value 35.
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4-7, 7a |
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035 |
constitutional code; evidence; procedure code |
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047 |
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004 |
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text sheet |
4 |
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recto |
f5 / f6 / f7 / f8 |
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jeremy bentham |
[[watermarks::l munn [britannia with shield emblem]]] |
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benjamin constant |
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10640 |
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