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Offenders Principal & Accessory ACCOMPLICES. RECEIVERS. in AVARICE REND
PROCURERS in
Crimes of HATRED
Attacking active/the immediate malefactors is like attacking the Wasps in September, when
whatever success so ever you meet with against them, you can never flatter yourself
with being able utterly to extirpate them — attacking the Receivers is like attacking
the Mother-Wasps in June, in cutting off crushing one of which you extirpate a whole brood
in Embryo or intercept their them in/before creation.
What the Receivers are in Crimes [generated by] which have rapacity for their motive
The Procurers, or those which our Law calls Accessories before the fact, while it
gives the name of Principals only to the mechanical perpetrators, are to these latter, in
Crimes which originate in revenge. A Class of men, much less numerous than its' corresponding one
in the other class of crimes; in a country where how abandoned so ever a single individual may
now & then be found, men practised in blood are so rare it is sudden indeed that case such an one knew where to meet with one [as abandoned
as himself] like himself to take off from his hands the task of perpetration: a mark of Blood is a thing unheard
of: he who conceives must execute: for he knows even if that wretch who will plunder what first comes
within his gripe, in a fit of terror or intoxication & perhaps even murder to prevent discovery, or resistance that it is a
great chance if he with
any consideration lend
himself to a purpose as
horrid in cool blood to the
passions of another.
The unvitiated unsophisticated good sense of mankind would
have found less difficulty
If would it have said you can not clear Society of all
the nuisances which infest it, clear
it of as many as you can.
Now is there any reason why the
acquittal of the principal should
preclude the Trial of the accessory.
It might may be that the person who
has been tried for being principal
in the crime in which the person
in question is charged with being
accessory, was not so; but somebody
else was: it might may be, that that he was, but
the evidence was not full enough
against him.
Either the prosecutor has reason
to think the evidence strong enough
to convict the suspected accessory,
or he has not: if he has not,
he will [not attempt it, or supposing
him bound to attempt it, the attempt
will only have the consequence
of which it ought to have of absolving the suspected person
if he has, why resort to an general]
equivocal inference presumption concerning
the probability of guilt when
you have a particular evidence
directly pointing to the case in
question.
The innocence of the suspected
accessory is but one of three cases
the 2 others of which have been already specified
which may equally obtain one
the acquittal of the suspected principal:
why proceed at once to the
establishment of this, as if it were the
only one?
The reasoning of Lawyers on this which
we find always observe at least till very
lately more governed by workings of imagination
than by views conceptions of utility
was regulated as we learn form
themselves in this instance by
the notion of an ideal incongruity
in the conviction of the
one after the acquittal of the
other — It would be absurd
says . . .
. . . . . ..
. . . . . . .
There is indeed Now an absurdity inconvenience
in this; it must be confessed there is an absurdity if any one
chooses to express it so: but the an
inconvenience which lies, not in the
conviction of the guilty accomplice
but in the acquittal of the guilty
principal. There is an inconvenience
rivetted in one rolled into the nature of things to the
danger of which Justice is exposed in
these cases; but if it is great when
it happens, that is no reason why you
should make it greater.
Whatever may be the case with this, it
is an indisputable absurdity, that the
Law should suppose the means which
it employs inapt for the very purposes
for which it employs them:
that it should ordain trials by a Jury
to see whether a man be innocent guilty
or no, & suppose that they will find
him guilty when he is not so: now
if he is not so, nor found to be so,
there is no mischief done: (at least no
mischief that is comparable to that which
subsists in the other event.) If he is
guilty does not everybody see the
absurdity of turning him loose into
Society, for this reason especially being as we have seen the
more dangerous person of the two, for
this curious reason, because there
has been already one much too
many turned loose into it before him?
accordingly in those few
instances which occur in
the history of our Jurisprudence
of revengeful murders perpetrated
in conjunction for the
greater part will I believe
be found to have been happened where the
motives of the concerned have been jointly conceived
& of the same kind.
[Qu this from the Trials?]
It was the rude Inhabitants
of a scarce yet civilized
part of the country the heat
of poverty & therefore of innocence
according to the dream
of superficial poctical moralizers, they
in our latter times have presented
us with an example
of the only hired crew of
Murderers Assassins which this Isle
has then seen for these say 2
years.
In Misdemeanours all are Principals: one associate may be therefore be
tried without another. The fate of the Accessory depends not upon
the nature of his guilt; but upon the nature of the Punishment
of his principal.
OFFENDERS Principal and Accessory [BR][4 ] Receivers = Procurers
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