Reports Of Decisions In Criminal Cases Made At Term At Chambers And In The Courts Of Oyer And Terminer Of The State Of New York Vol 1 Classic Reprint

Excerpt from Reports of Decisions in Criminal Cases Made at Term, at Chambers, and in the Courts of Oyer and Terminer of the State of New York, Vol. 1 It has been thought also, that it would greatly facilitate the investigation of questions of criminal law, to collect to gether, in the same volume, the decisions made at the Gen eral Term, at Chambers and at the Oyer and Terminer. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Though originally an interloper in a system of justice mediated by courtroom battles, plea bargaining now dominates American criminal justice. This book traces the evolution of plea bargaining from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century to its present pervasive role. Through the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, judges showed far less enthusiasm for plea bargaining than did prosecutors. After all, plea bargaining did not assure judges “victory”; judges did not suffer under the workload that prosecutors faced; and judges had principled objections to dickering for justice and to sharing sentencing authority with prosecutors. The revolution in tort law, however, brought on a flood of complex civil cases, which persuaded judges of the wisdom of efficient settlement of criminal cases. Having secured the patronage of both prosecutors and judges, plea bargaining quickly grew to be the dominant institution of American criminal procedure. Indeed, it is difficult to name a single innovation in criminal procedure during the last 150 years that has been incompatible with plea bargaining’s progress and survived.

Originally published: 5th ed. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1956.

The Trials of Allegiance examines the law of treason during the American Revolution: a convulsive, violent civil war in which nearly everyone could be considered a traitor, either to Great Britain or to America. Drawing from extensive archival research in Pennsylvania, one of the main centers of the revolution, Carlton Larson provides the most comprehensive analysis yet of the treason prosecutions brought by Americans against British adherents: through committees of safety, military tribunals, and ordinary criminal trials. Although popular rhetoric against traitors was pervasive in Pennsylvania, jurors consistently viewed treason defendants not as incorrigibly evil, but as fellow Americans who had made a political mistake. This book explains the repeated and violently controversial pattern of acquittals. Juries were carefully selected in ways that benefited the defendants, and jurors refused to accept the death penalty as an appropriate punishment for treason. The American Revolution, unlike many others, would not be enforced with the gallows. More broadly, Larson explores how the Revolution's treason trials shaped American national identity and perceptions of national allegiance. He concludes with the adoption of the Treason Clause of the United States Constitution, which was immediately put to use in the early 1790s in response to the Whiskey Rebellion and Fries's Rebellion. In taking a fresh look at these formative events, The Trials of Allegiance reframes how we think about treason in American history, up to and including the present.