Atrocious Judges : Lives of Judges Infamous as Tools of Tyrants and Instruments of Oppression

Some discussion arose between the district attorney and the counsel of Mr. Williamson. Mr. Van Dyke contended that the reply of the defendant was evasive and contradictory. The judge said the difficulty, he thought, could be easily overcome by amending the answer, and at the suggestion of the court it was amended in the following manner:

‘I did not seek to obey the writ by producing the persons in the writ mentioned before this court. I did not seek, because I verily believed that it was entirely impossible for me to produce the said persons, agreeably to the command of the court.’

This answer was then accepted by the court and ordered filed.

Mr. Van Dyke then submitted another interrogatory, the substance of which was, whether or not Mr. Williamson had been guilty of mental reservations in his reply to the first interrogatory?

The court overruled this interrogatory as superfluous and improper.

Mr. Van Dyke withdrew this interrogatory and offered another, which was also overruled by the court, on the ground that it led to such replies as had already been objected to by the district attorney.

Mr. Van Dyke also withdrew this question.

Judge Kane then remarked that the district attorney had been invited to aid the court in this case, but that he would bear in mind that his relation to Mr. Wheeler was now suspended. This was only an inquiry as to what injury had been done the process of the court.

Mr. Van Dyke said he was aware of the position he occupied.

Judge Kane then said: ‘The contempt is now regarded as purged and the party is released from custody. He is now reinstated in the position he occupied before the contempt was committed. Mr. Williamson is now before me on the return to the writ.’

Mr. Van Dyke then arose and addressed the court.

After Mr. Van Dyke had concluded, Mr. Meredith inquired: ‘Is Mr. Williamson discharged?’

Judge Kane replied, ‘He is. I understand from the remarks of the district attorney, that a nolle prosequi has been entered in the case in this court.’

The court then adjourned. Mr. Williamson was congratulated by his friends on his restoration to liberty.158

1

The German graf, for which the Latin comes (in English, count or earl) was employed as an equivalent, is a form of the same word. The law Latin for sheriff is vice-comes, a name given, it would appear, after the title of earl or count had become hereditary, to the officer who still continued to be elected by the people for the official functions originally discharged by the earl.

2

See Forsyth’s History of Trial by Jury, ch. iv. sec. 4.

3

History of England, Appendix, I.

4

The decision of this majority would seem to have been principally determined, if the party complained against denied the charge, by the method of compurgation, in which the oath of the defendant was sustained by that of a certain number of his neighbors, who thereby certified their confidence in him; or, if he could not produce compurgators, and dared to venture upon it, by a superstitious appeal to the ordeal.

5

History of England, Appendix, II.

6

We may observe that even at present, whether in England or America, though the depositaries of the legislative and executive authority (which in those times the king was) sit no longer openly and personally on the bench, it still remains no easy matter, in cases in which they take an interest, to obtain in either country a judicial decision contrary to the inclination of these two authorities.

7

In the king’s absence – and the Anglo-Norman kings were often absent on visits to their continental dominions – this chief justiciary acted in all respects as the king’s substitute, no less in military than in civil affairs, those who held it being selected quite as much for warlike prowess as for judicial skill. Such was the case with Ranulphus de Granville, chief justiciary of Henry II., A. D. 1180-1191, whose treatise in Latin, On the Laws and Customs of the Kingdom of England, is the oldest book of the common law. He went with Richard I. on the third crusade, and was killed at the siege of Acre.

8

It might rather be said, a scholastic art, in which forms and words became matters of much greater consideration than substantial justice, and in which technical rules were substituted for the exercise of the reasoning faculties.

9

Not merely were these appeals introduced, but process was invented by which suits commenced in these local courts might, before they were finished, be removed into the king’s courts, by the writ of pone and others.

10

Originally, and down to a comparatively recent period, the Inns of Court were real schools, “readers” or lecturers being appointed for the instruction of the students, who were only admitted to practice after a sharp examination. Now, the examination is a mere form, and the student seeks instruction where he pleases. Even the nominal term of study has been reduced to five, and in some cases to three years.

11

This distinction between attorneys and barristers, though still in full vogue in England and in several of the British colonies, is not recognized in the United States, where, indeed, it never had but a feeble and transient existence.

12

Down to the period of the reformation the abbots of the greater monasteries sat also in this house.

13

If the Lords, says Campbell, were still liable to be so interrogated, they would not unfrequently be puzzled; and the revival of the practice might be a check on hasty legislation. It certainly would be a check upon the practice of courts, now so frequent, of putting an interpretation on statutes totally different from the intentions of those who frame them.

14

Hence the necessity of venue, that is, the allegation in all declarations and indictments of some place in some county where the matter complained of happened, in order to a trial by a jury of the vicinage. In personal actions this necessity of trying a case in the county where the transaction occurred was got rid of by first setting out the true place of the transaction, and then alleging under a videlicet a venue in the county where the action was brought, which latter allegation the courts would not allow to be disputed. But in criminal proceedings and real actions the necessity of a trial in the county where the offence was committed or the land lies still continues.

The origin of the jury in a body of neighbors who decided from their own knowledge will seem less remarkable when we recollect that by the customs of the Anglo-Saxons all sales of land, contracts, &c., between individuals took place in public at the hundred and county courts, the memory of the freeholders present thus serving in place of written records. See Palgrave’s English Commonwealth, vol. i. p. 213.

15

See Forsyth’s Trial by Jury, ch. x. sec. 1.

16

Down to the time of Elizabeth all cases occurring in Middlesex county, in which Westminster lies, were thus tried in bank.

17

In London and Middlesex four sessions were held a year; in the four northern counties only one.

18

This history holds out to our state tribunals significant warnings as to the danger to which they are exposed on the part of the federal judges, especially those of the District Courts, who sitting singly on the bench, and with powers enormously and most dangerously extended by recent legislation, have from the unity and concentration of the one-man power, a great advantage over courts liable to be retarded in their action, if not reduced to imbecility by divisions among their members.

19

The appeal from the English colonial courts to the king in council – the appeal cases being heard and decided by a committee of the privy councillors learned in the law – is another remnant of the old system, in which the constitution of the ancient Aula Regis has been very accurately preserved.

20

Both these courts proceeded according to the forms of the civil law, and without a jury. But occasionally the court of equity directed questions of fact arising before it to be settled by jury trial, and by a statute of Henry VIII. the trial of all maritime felonies before the Admiralty Court was directed to be by jury.

21

Hyde, (afterwards Lord Clarendon,) himself a lawyer, by whom the usurpations of this court were brought to the notice of Parliament, stated that more damages had been given by the earl marshal in his days, for words of supposed defamation, of which the law took no notice, than by all the courts of Westminster Hall during a whole term.

22

The name is sometimes spelt Brabaçon, Brabançon, Brabason, and Brabanson.

23

Hume, who designates them “desperate ruffians,” says “troops of them were sometimes enlisted in the service of one prince or baron, sometimes in that of another; they often acted in an independent manner, and under leaders of their own. The greatest monarchs were not ashamed, on occasion, to have recourse to their assistance; and as their habits of war and depredation had given them experience, hardiness, and courage, they generally composed the most formidable part of those armies which decided the political quarrels of princes.” – Vol. i. 438. In America we have no mercenary soldiers, but plenty of mercenary politicians, almost as much to be dreaded. —Ed.

24

They were removed because, during the king’s absence on the continent, they had been guilty of taking bribes, and other misdemeanors. Of De Wayland, one of their number, and the first chief justice of the Common Pleas, Lord Campbell gives the following account: When arrested, on the king’s return from Aquitaine, conscious of his guilt, he contrived to escape from custody, and, disguising himself in the habit of a monk, he was admitted among friars-minors in a convent at Bury St. Edmund’s. However, being considered a heinous offender, sharp pursuit was made after him, and he was discovered wearing a cowl and a serge jerkin. According to the law of sanctuary, then prevailing, he was allowed to remain forty days unmolested. At the end of that time the convent was surrounded by a military force, and the entry of provisions into it was prohibited. Still it would have been deemed sacrilegious to take him from his asylum by violence; but the lord chief justice preferred surrendering himself to perishing from want. He was immediately conducted to the Tower of London. Rather than stand a trial, he petitioned for leave to abjure the realm; this favor was granted to him on condition that he should be attainted, and forfeit all his lands and chattels to the crown. Having walked barefoot and bareheaded, with a crucifix in his hand, to the sea side at Dover, he was put on board a ship and departed to foreign parts. He is said to have died in exile, and he left a name often quoted as a reproach to the bench till he was superseded by Jeffreys and Scroggs.

25

That is, in the ordinary discharge of his duties. His attempt to take away the liberties of the Scotch we shall presently see. —Ed.

26

Just like our northern candidates for the presidency, and the dough-face politicians who contrive to get chosen to Congress by northern constituencies, whose rights they then barter away and betray. —Ed.

27

This is the very ground upon which it is attempted, now, to justify the repeal of the Missouri prohibition of slavery, while Brabacon’s defence of English judges in Scotland is a counterpart to the justification by our federal judges of the authority given to slave-catching commissioners. —Ed.

28

May the pending attempts of the Southern States, countenanced and supported by the federal judges, to establish a “superiority” and “direct dominion” over the north, be met and repelled with similar spirit and success! —Ed.

29

He had been murdered by a body of insurgent peasants headed by Jack Straw, one of the leaders in Wat Tyler’s insurrection. —Ed.

30

Some of our federal judges would no doubt like very much to see this rule established among us. —Ed.

31

The persistence of Richard II. in the same arbitrary principles of which the advocacy cost Tresilian his life, caused his deposition a few years afterwards, as to which, Lord Campbell observes, —

“While we honor Lord Somers and the patriots who took the most active part in the revolution of 1688, by which a king was cashiered, hereditary right was disregarded, and a new dynasty was placed on the throne, we are apt to consider the kings of the house of Lancaster as usurpers, and those who sided with them as rebels. Yet there is great difficulty in justifying the deposition of James II., and condemning the deposition of Richard II. The latter sovereign, during a reign of above twenty years, had proved himself utterly unfit to govern the nation, and, after repeated attempts to control him, and promises on his part to submit to constitutional advice, he was still under the influence of worthless favorites, and was guilty of continued acts of tyranny and oppression; so that the nation, which, with singular patience, had often forgiven his misconduct from respect to the memory of his father and his grandfather, was now almost unanimously resolved to submit no longer to his rule.”

32

Fuller, in praising Fortescue and Markham, says, “These I may call two chief justices of the chief justices, for their signal integrity; for though the one of them favored the house of Lancaster, and the other of York, in the titles to the crown, both of them favored the house of Justice in matters betwixt party and party.”

33

A list by no means limited to England, but very much lengthened out in America. —Ed.

34

Some of our American advocates of constructive treasons have laid down the law much in the same spirit. —Ed.

35

It was, we may suppose, from this charge that Mr. Justice Curtis, of the Supreme Court of the United States, got the law retailed in his charge to the grand jury of the Massachusetts District, in consequence of which indictments were found against Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker for obstructing the execution of the fugitive slave act – on the ground that certain speeches of theirs in Faneuil Hall against that statute “referred to a purpose” and “incited to an act” of resistance to it, thereby making their expression of opinion criminal. —Ed.

36

The recent claim set up in America for legislative supremacy over conscience – a claim contended for by so many of our leading lawyers and divines – is not less blasphemous and outrageous than this claim of Henry VIII., and belongs to the same category. —Ed.

37

This would hardly be allowed by some of our American juridical deniers and deriders of the “higher law.” It is hard to distinguish a law (such as the fugitive slave act) which sets the moral sentiment at defiance, from a law that God shall not be God. —Ed.

38

One striking instance, among a thousand, both old and new, how little the so much vaunted decisions of courts virtually amount to. Decisions that are to stand, can only stand upon their own inherent rectitude and reasonableness, and not upon the authority of those who make them. —Ed.

39

Noy at this time was of the popular party. He afterwards went over to the court, and was made attorney general. —Ed.

40

Similar pretences of respect for law and popular rights often serve as preface here in America to judgments as atrocious as that of Chief Justice Hyde. —Ed.

41

This is the universal excuse for all sins, whether of omission or commission, on the part of courts who pay but little regard to Bishop Burnet’s sensible observation that a precedent against reason “signifies no more but that the like injustice has been done before.” —Ed.

42

Though the lawyers, both in England and America, have long since abandoned the pretence, so impudently maintained by Hyde, of a right in the executive authorities to imprison for contempt, into the ground and nature of which the courts had no right to inquire, they still claim for themselves and for one another – at least in Pennsylvania – a like right, and insist with the same unction upon the absolute necessity of trusting “the courts” in these matters, and of relying upon their “mercy.” See, in the Appendix, No. 3, the opinion of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, as delivered by Judge Black, of which the insolent conclusion was evidently borrowed from the above opinion of Chief Justice Hyde. —Ed.

43

This celebrated lawyer, who had succeeded Fleming as chief justice of the King’s Bench, had been, as well as Crewe, turned out of office after holding the place for three years, because he would not allow the government to interfere with his administration of justice. He was now the leader of the popular party in the House of Commons. —Ed.

44

We have had recent striking instances in America of the same thing in some of the “misconstructions” placed by judges on the laws in restraint of drunkenness and liquor selling. —Ed.

45

Like those given by several federal judges in support of the fugitive slave act. —Ed.

46

Noy had begun, like Brampston, a flaming patriot, but, like him and so many other lawyers, had been bought over to the side of power by the hope of promotion, and being made attorney general, had advised the issue of the writs for ship money. —Ed.

47

Cro. Car. 403. These forms are no longer used. The chief justice is now sworn in privately before the chancellor; and without any speechifying he enters the court and takes his place on the bench with the other judges. But in Scotland they still subject the new judge to trials of his sufficiency; while these are going on he is called lord probationer; and he might undoubtedly be plucked if the court should think fit.

48

This is exactly the sort of judges from whom we in America have so much to fear. —Ed.

49

We have seen in America similar attempts to stop counsel from exposing the unsoundness of judicial opinions given in support of the fugitive slave act. —Ed.

50

This is the very doctrine lately revived, in a little different shape, by some of our American divines – that whatsoever the legislative power in its conscience thinks it may require, we ought to yield. —Ed.

51

Some of our American federal judges are in the habit of declaiming much in the same style against abolitionists – who, indeed, may be considered as occupying a position in our present affairs in many respects parallel to that of the English Puritans in the times of Charles I. —Ed.

52

Having once refused to hear counsel against ship money, he now undertook to square the account by refusing to hear counsel for it. —Ed.

53

See life of Hyde, ante, p. 97.

54

This supposed inability of the king to do wrong has in America among a certain class been transferred to the federal government, which represents the royal authority of the English. —Ed.

55

2 Bl. Com. 69. Compulsory knighthood was abolished by the Long Parliament, 16 Car. I. c. 20.

56

Their decisions are still of as much authority on legal questions as those of courts sitting under a commission from the crown; and they were published with the sanction of the chancellor and all the judges in the reigns of Charles II. and James II.

57

It is doubtless a like mixture of motives that prompts just now the conduct of some of our American lawyers. —Ed.

58

Charles II., in his Declaration from Breda, had promised that he should “proceed only against the immediate murderers of his royal father.”

59

In answer to the address of the two Houses of the Convention Parliament to spare the lives of Vane and Lambert, the lord chancellor reported, “His majesty grants the desire of the said petition;” – the ancient form of passing acts of Parliament. The ultra Cavalier House of Commons which followed desired Vane’s death, but could not alter the law or abrogate the royal promise.

60

In his younger days, before the civil war, Sir Henry Vane had been among the early emigrants to Massachusetts, and as governor of that colony had borne a part in some remarkable transactions there. – See Hildreth’s History of the United States, vol. i. ch. ix.

61

A fortress on the south shore of the English Channel, taken by Cromwell from the Spaniards, and by Charles II. sold at this time to Louis XIV. of France.

62

So Bacon, better at precept than at practice, in his advice to Sir George Villars, requires in judges these three attributes – they must be men of courage, fearing God, and hating covetousness: an ignorant man cannot, a coward dare not be a good judge. On the American bench we have too many cowards. —Ed.

63

The following dialogue occurred after the verdict: —

Prisoner.– I most humbly beseech your lordship to remember my condition, (he had before stated himself to be the father of nine small children,) and intercede for me.

Lord Hyde.– I would not intercede for my own father in this case, if he were alive.

64

This practice of putting questions to the prisoner intended to intimidate him, to involve him in contradictions, or to elicit from him some indiscreet admission, had ceased during the Commonwealth, but was revived by the new royal judges.

65

This was the same doctrine afterwards attempted to be maintained by Lord Mansfield, but overruled by a declaratory act of Parliament.

66

An American specimen of this style of judicial decision may be found in Judge Grier’s way of speaking on the bench about Abolitionists. —Ed.

67

6 State Trials, 701-709.

68

2 Hale, P. C. 158.

69

The above passage enclosed in brackets has been added by the editor. Our American judges, more subtle than their predecessors, instead of fining juries for not rendering verdicts according to directions, have introduced the practice of questioning jurors beforehand, and not allowing them to sit unless they pass a satisfactory examination. —Ed.

70

This was an expensive residence built by Clarendon, to which the populace gave that name, under the unfounded idea that the expense of it was defrayed out of bribes received for consenting to the sale of Dunkirk. —Ed.

71

This has been from great antiquity the decoration of the English chief justices. Dugdale says it is derived from the name of St. Simplicius, a Christian judge, who suffered martyrdom under the Emperor Diocletian. —Ed.

72

Among these was, “whether the act of severing the head of Charles I. from his body could be alleged to have been committed in his own lifetime,” and “whether it should be laid as against the peace of the late or of the present king.” Judge Mallet made the confusion more confounded by maintaining that by the law of England a day is indivisible; and that, as Charles II. certainly was our lawful king during a part of that day, no part of it had been in the reign of Charles I.