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Revolutionary American Jury: A Case Study of the
1778-1779 Philadelphia Treason Trials
Carlton F. W. Larson
https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1547&context=smulr
In late eighteenth-century England, most felony cases were prosecuted by private parties, generally the victims. 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. 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." 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. 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. The next day, Claypoole issued a proclamation announcing the court's sitting. Claypoole presumably selected and summoned the grand jury and the panel of trial jurors sometime between August 21 and September 21.
Pages 1453, 1454