Justice in 18th Court The workings of a criminal court in the 18th century were quite different from what

we expect today. First of all, its important to say that it was a period of transition between the old localized and personalized justice of the Middle Age and the modern impartial application of justice. Of course, the typical way of thought of this period was still well - rooted in the minds of English people. They used to cope with every crime which took place near them, and with every single person involved in it. So, their vision was not projected to abstraction, but focused on practical matters .Only the worst crimes were punished by the Royal Court: the less important ones were held on the local courts, and so the accused was himself a victim of the local mentality and of peoples judgment. As John Beattie, a critic, said: Who the prisoner was, was as a crucial question as what he had done (and even in some cases whether he had done it), and it was centrally the business of the trial to find the answer. An example of this can be Mary Taylor and her husband, Smiths case. Together, they killed Marys mistress. For the murder, she was burned at the stake, and he was hanged. They didnt have any chance to defend. While standing on the pillory, she said she wasnt guilty, but Smith was completely drunk: the Court didnt even listen to them. Persecutions There was no public persecutors. Attempts to create them failed in 1855 and again in 1871. In 18th century England a system of professional police and prosecutors, government paid and appointed, was viewed as potentially tyrannical and, worse still, French. So a victim of crime who wanted a constable to undertake any substantial effort in order to apprehend the perpetrator was expected to pay the expenses of doing so. Under English law, any Englishman could prosecute any crime. In practice, the prosecutor was usually the victim. It was up to him to file charges with the local magistrate, present evidence to the grand jury, and, if the grand jury found a true bill, provide evidence for the trial. If the victim of a crime won his case, the criminal was hanged, transported, or possibly pardoned. The trials were often not impartial. In fact, prisoners were not allowed to see the evidence against them before trial, and, once in the courtroom, they were not allowed to testify. They could make a final statement, but it might not contain their defense for the jury. They had only one chance to defend themselves: before trial, they were expected to submit a written defense that was to be read aloud in court. However, this was a grave disadvantage for the poor and the ignorant, who frequently could neither read or write. If the accused stood mute, they were tortured: sometimes they died in the process. At the end of the process, if they were found not guilty, they usually had to pay back the expenses related to their imprisonment, the Jailors fees. If they could not afford it, they were imprisoned again, as debtors. Dissatisfaction with the perceived problems of private prosecution, and concerns with what was perceived as a high and rising crime rate, eventually led to the introduction of full scale paid police forces, first in London in 1829 and later elsewhere in England. The police took over from the private prosecutors much of the cost of locating and convicting criminals. As the century passed, the police also took over much of the job of prosecuting criminals. The result, by the end of the century, was a system where prosecution was still for the most part nominally private, but where the private prosecutor was usually a police officer.

Criminals: thieves Because of the high tax of crime in the 18th Century, substantial rewards were offered to people who denounced criminals, in particular thieves: they were called Thief takers. However, they were often corrupted, and they protected guilty people in exchange of money, or committed the crime by themselves, accusing instead a poor, innocent man. Offenses like petty larceny-theft of goods worth less than a shillingwere typically punished with punishments designed largely to shame the offender, such as public whipping or exposure in the stocks. Jonathan Wilde was a thief taker who had stolen some Yards of Lace, accusing an innocent man of the crime. He was soon discovered and brought to Court. At the end, he was hanged for theft and for being in league with some criminals he was charged with catching. Punishment For what concerns the punishments, the accused could be condemned to pay a fee, to life, or, for theft, murder and the worst crimes, to death. In analyzing the choice among alternative punishments, a useful concept is punishment inefficiency: the ratio of punishment cost to amount of punishment. A costlessly collected fine or damage payment has an inefficiency of 0; what one person loses another gets. Execution has an inefficiency of about 1; the criminal loses his life and nobody gets one. Imprisonment, as practiced in the U.S. at present, has an inefficiency considerably greater than 1. The criminal loses his liberty, nobody gets it, and the state must pay for the prison. But the imprisonment was not considered a reasonable alternative to capital punishment, since it was too expensive and placed young criminals into contact with older, encouraging partnerships: so, the death penalty was considered the best alternative, although lot of times judged immoral and excessive. The accused could be hanged, beheaded, burned at stake or broken on the wheel. A more interesting option was to constrict the criminal to prison labor that had an efficiency of about 2: the criminal lost the freedom and does works for the community. Punishments for serious crime were not limited to execution and transportation. There was also the possibility of a payment, in cash or kind, worked out between criminal and prosecutor. The legal punishments of prison labor and hanging were less efficient than fines but still more efficient, and less costly to the state, than imprisonment. Conclusion I have attempted to show that the institutions used in 18th century England to discourage serious crime may have been well adapted to that purpose. The preference for extreme punishments reflected the greater cost of the obvious intermediate punishment, and was relaxed as the society became richer. The system of private enforcement worked both because deterrence could be produced as a private good and because compounding provided an incentive to prosecutors and a punishment for criminals.