The Origins Of Adversary Criminal Trial

The lawyer-dominated adversary system of criminal trial, which now typifies practice in Anglo-American legal systems, was developed in England in the 18th century. This text shows how and why lawyers were able to capture the trial.

Adversary trial emerged in England only in the 18th century. This book focuses on the birth and meaning of adversary trial and also on the historic central role of the lawyer and advocate Sir William Garrow.

In Criminal Discovery: From Truth to Proof and Back Again, author Cosmas Moisidis examines aspects of pre-trial stages such as police interrogations, preliminary hearings and discovery between the prosecution and the defence, addressing contentious issues such as the right to silence and the privilege against self-incrimination. These issues give rise to strong, emotive and polarised differences of opinion. Criminal discovery is an area in which views are entrenched and passions run high. Criminal Discovery: From Truth to Proof and Back Again seeks to inform the current debate through a detailed analysis of the history, theory and practice of criminal discovery. Historical and jurisprudential matters which are not commonly known are here brought to light. The approach is holistic and comparative, examining the issues in detail with reference to the jurisdictions of the United Kingdom, United States, particularly California, and Australia. It concludes with recommendations to guide the future, putting forward a reciprocal criminal discovery model which, it is argued, will enhance the truth seeking potential of the adversarial criminal trial.

Allyson May chronicles the history of the English criminal trial and the development of a criminal bar in London between 1750 and 1850. She charts the transformation of the legal process and the evolution of professional standards of conduct for the criminal bar through an examination of the working lives of the Old Bailey barristers of the period. In describing the rise of adversarialism, May uncovers the motivations and interests of prosecutors, defendants, the bench, and the state, as well as the often-maligned "Old Bailey hacks" themselves. Traditionally, the English criminal trial consisted of a relatively unstructured altercation between the victim-prosecutor and the accused, who generally appeared without a lawyer. A criminal bar had emerged in London by the 1780s, and in 1836 the Prisoners' Counsel Act recognized the defendant's right to legal counsel in felony trials and lifted many restrictions on the activities of defense lawyers. May explores the role of barristers before and after the Prisoners' Counsel Act. She also details the careers of individual members of the bar--describing their civil practice in local, customary courts as well as their criminal practice--and the promotion of Old Bailey counsel to the bench of that court. A comprehensive biographical appendix augments this discussion.

During the first half of the 19th century, the criminal trial changed beyond recognition to attain its modern adversarial form. This book discusses the dynamics of this transformation and, in particular, the role of the Prisoners' Counsel Act 1836.

To be convicted of a crime in the United States, a person must be proven guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt.” But what is reasonable doubt? Even sophisticated legal experts find this fundamental doctrine difficult to explain. In this accessible book, James Q. Whitman digs deep into the history of the law and discovers that we have lost sight of the original purpose of “reasonable doubt.” It was not originally a legal rule at all, he shows, but a theological one. The rule as we understand it today is intended to protect the accused. But Whitman traces its history back through centuries of Christian theology and common-law history to reveal that the original concern was to protect the souls of jurors. In Christian tradition, a person who experienced doubt yet convicted an innocent defendant was guilty of a mortal sin. Jurors fearful for their own souls were reassured that they were safe, as long as their doubts were not “reasonable.” Today, the old rule of reasonable doubt survives, but it has been turned to different purposes. The result is confusion for jurors, and a serious moral challenge for our system of justice.

Cases connected with the troubles in Northern Ireland have been tried by a judge sitting without a jury in `Diplock Courts'. Given the symbolic importance of the jury within the common law tradition, this study offers the first systematic comparison of the process of trial by judge alone withthat of trial by jury. The authors determine the impact of the replacement of jury trial with trial by a professional judge on the adversarial character of the criminal trial process.

Criminal justice procedure is the bedrock of human rights. Surprisingly, however, in an era of unprecedented change in criminal justice around the world, it is often dismissed as technical and unimportant. This failure to take procedure seriously has a terrible cost, allowing reform to be driven by purely pragmatic considerations, cost-cutting or foreign influence. Current US political domination, for example, has produced a historic and global shift towards more adversarial procedure, which is widely misunderstood and inconsistently implemented. This book addresses such issues by bringing together a huge range of historical and contemporary research on criminal justice in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia and the Americas. It proposes a theory of procedure derived from the three great international trial modes of 'inquisitorial justice', 'adversarial justice' and 'popular justice'. This approach opens up the possibility of assessing criminal justice from a more objective standpoint, as well as providing a sourcebook for comparative study and practical reform around the world.