The Jury Laws and Their Amendment |
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Author:
| Erle, T. W. (Twynihoe William) |
ISBN: | 978-0-217-11973-3 |
Publication Date: | Aug 2009 |
Publisher: | General Books LLC
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Book Format: | Paperback |
List Price: | USD $19.99 |
Book Description:
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: EXEMPTIONS. The exemption of Ministers of Religion deserves some consideration. It is true that the clergy of every denomination are, and always have been, excused, but if it be proper to regard service on juries as a duty which all good citizens who are duly qualified for its discharge should share,...
More DescriptionPurchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: EXEMPTIONS. The exemption of Ministers of Religion deserves some consideration. It is true that the clergy of every denomination are, and always have been, excused, but if it be proper to regard service on juries as a duty which all good citizens who are duly qualified for its discharge should share, excepting only those whose temporary withdrawal from their ordinary avocations would be clearly detrimental to the public interest, the wholesale exemption of a very large, well- to-do, eminently respectable, and therefore presumably eligible, section of the community should not be accepted as a mere matter of course, or indeed without some degree of careful and unprejudiced examination of the rights of the matter. The original exemption probably rested on several grounds, one of which is traceable to the feeling which largely prevailed among the early Christians against doing, or joining in, any act which might lead to the taking away of human life. Later on, in the fourth century, it was held, as a consequence of the feeling which has been described, that no priest might be a party to a capital charge. Hence the clergy acquired the position of official intercessors for criminals, and the right of sanctuary which was before possessed by the Imperial Statues, and by the Pagan temples, was accorded to the Churches. This account is taken from Mr. Lecky's History of European Morals, but statements to the same effect are found in numerous other authorities. When such opinions as these prevailed, an ecclesiastic could not, of course, properly take part in a trial of which a capital sentence might be the result. And since, until a few years ago, a large number of offences which would now be regarded as trivial were actually punished by death, no one who was not prepared to concur in a ...