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A CASE STUDY OF THE 1778-1779
PHILADELPHIA TREASON TRIALS
Carlton F.W. Larson
In late eighteenth-century England, most felony cases were prosecuted by private parties, generally the victims.82
82. JOHN H. LANGBEIN, THE ORIGINS OF ADVERSARY CRIMINAL TRIAL 99 (2003).
Treason cases, by contrast, were generally prosecuted by professional attorneys working for the crown such as the attorney general or solicitor general. Pennsylvania followed England's lead with respect to treason trials, entrusting all of the cases to the state's attorney general, Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant. On August 7, 1778, the SEC informed the Assembly that as "the professors of law are supposed to be making great sums of money by espousing the cause of the disaffected," it would be necessary to increase Sergeant's funding and to provide him with at least one assistant.85 This was the "more necessary, as there is every reason to suppose that some of the persons charged with treasonable practices will endeavour to obtain, at any expense, the most experienced council in this and the neighboring states."'86 The SEC warned, "[t]he bringing of Traitors to justice is at all times an object of great importance, and more especially so in our present circumstances. '87 The Assembly acquiesced, and the SEC offered the assistantship to Joseph Reed, a member of the Patriotic Society, noting the "important trials of traitors, which would employ the Supreme Court during the next winter." And thus the wheels of English criminal procedure, rusty from several years of disuse, again began to turn on the banks of the Delaware. The common law criminal jury, developed over hundreds of years in an island kingdom 3000 miles away, would be deployed in a way Englishmen could never have imagined-to try as traitors those men who had remained loyal to their English king. The process began on August 21, 1778, when the three justices of the Supreme Court issued a precept to Philadelphia County Sheriff James Claypoole for holding a Court of Oyer and Terminer and General Gaol Delivery at the State House, beginning on Monday, September 21.89 The next day, Claypoole issued a proclamation announcing the court's sitting.90 Claypoole presumably selected and summoned the grand jury and the panel of trial jurors sometime between
August 21 and September 21. 91
Note here the misinformation concerning the age of the ancient law, as it was the counterfeit "common law" in forms such as so-called "Equity" that was only recently developed "over hundreds of years in an island kingdom 3000 miles away." The ancient law (common law), goes way back before the Romans conquered England, bringing in Summary Justice with the Roman conquers. Saxons developed the common law in Germany, and once the Romans left (or were driven off), the Saxons imported the common law with them. The English, after the Roman Empire fell, or was pushed back, adapted the adaptable common law well before Magna Carta (1215), as explained here:
"Farther, though it be said here, that the king hath given and granted these liberties, yet it must not be understood that they were meer emanations of Royal favour, or new bounties granted, which the people could not justly challenge, or had not a right unto before; for as lord Coke in divers places asserts, and as is well known to every gentleman professing the law, this charter is, for the most part, only declaratory of the principal grounds of the fundamental laws and liberties of England. Not any new freedom is hereby granted, but a restitution of such as the subject lawfully had before, and to free them from the usurpations and incroachments of every power whatever. It is worthy observation, that this charter often mentions sua jura, their rights, and libertates suas, their liberties, which shews they were before intitled to and possessed them, and that those rights and liberties were by this charter not granted as before unknown, but confirmed, and that in the stile of liberties and privileges long before well known.”
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A33823.0001.001/1:4?rgn=div1;view=fulltext
So...obviously the author F.W. Larson is misinformed or is alternatively well-informed and writing (false) propaganda. I want this work to gain currency not because it is written from a member of the Cult of Might Makes Right, but because the facts of the matter: matter.
The specific facts that matter include how the jurors judged with leniency, while the Bosses in power were more inclined to represent an angry mob.
Perhaps I cannot repeat this enough, not so much to convince myself as to offer this to other people for their judgment, in case mine is terrible wrong. The idea with voluntary association for mutual defense, with the goal of holding each offender to an accurate accounting of the facts that matter in any case of conflict involving injury done to innocent people, or even threats of injury to as yet targeted innocent people, is the idea that is categorically not wishful thinking that wishes away the angry mobs.
The angry mobs are those people who, by their power of will, become outlaws, and they target people who may or may not be innocent, and they will to maliciously attack potentially innocent people, for something called vengeance, or revenge, or just to have fun, who knows? Who knows if the facts that matter in the case are not discovered, not put in front of representatives of the whole country, and not determined in that ancient way of arriving at the law of the land?
If the