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The Elements of the Art of Packing as Applied to Special Juries
The Elements of the Art of Packing as Applied to Special Juries Author:Jeremy Bentham 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: CHAP. IV. Special Juries, A Special Engine Of Corruption. § 1. The System briefy stated. WE have seen what expedients the nature of the case af- ford£, for... more » moulding juries into obsequiousness, principally by means of corruption; and thus divesting, as much as may be, of all reality, the appearance which they exhibit of a check to the arbitrary power of the judge. We now come to speak of the instrument or engine, contrived for that purpose; applied to it, and to this day continuing to be applied to it, and with what disastrous success will be seen as we advance. This engine, in no small de. gree a complicated one, is no other than the sort of jury termed special jury. A special jury is so termed to distinguish it from a common jury: this last name being reserved for the designation ol the only sort of jury, which, till the invention of this special instrument ot corruption, was in existence. Above has been brought to view, in the character of a possible one, an arrangement, by means of which (bating such rare and casual exceptions as are liable to be now and then produced by the irregularities of the human mind] a body of men, be they who they may, may be brought into a state of constant and complete obsequiousness to the will of some person or persons, (in the present instance the judge) between whom and them the requisite sort of relation has, in the manner there indicated, been established. In the case of a special jury, this possible arrangement will be found to have been, and to remain to this day, completely realized. As of the true and original jury, so of this impostrout modern substitute, the origin lies buried in obscurity. Human craft in every shape, and, in particular, in the shape of lawyer-craft—human-craft, like the mole, hides its ways from the li...« less