Book contents
8 - Deciding What Was Good and Bad
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2009
Summary
Trial
For the defendant and the prosecutor, the process of arrest and hearing or committal was to lead to the trial. In minor cases heard before magistrates the depositions were quickly followed by judgment; for serious cases there were some weeks or months spent waiting for trial. Both magisterial decision and trial were governed by the ritual of English legal procedure. In discussion of the higher courts, Hay writes that ‘a considered use of imagery, eloquent speech and the power of death … had considerable psychic force’. When we consider the terrain this book has covered, the clamour to give evidence, the understandings of what was material evidence, the revenge, the suspicions–all of these were silenced. Pre-trial events and trial inhabited two different realms of understanding and the trial was an epilogue to all that preceded it. As the Chief Justice announced in the criminal court in 1826, ‘in a criminal proceeding, the awarding of punishment was in the province of the Court alone, which could throw out what was bad and pronounce on what was good.’
At every point in the making of a criminal case, decisions were made: as to what was suspicious behaviour, when property was interfered with, what was trespass, what was an assault, a murder, a horrific act. But the court made the final decision.
Case papers, as we have seen, often exhibited a clash between the perceptions of the magistrates and the perceptions of the ordinary population.
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- Criminal Law and Colonial Subject , pp. 265 - 285Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993