VOL. V.
No. 8.
BOSTON.
AUGUST, 1893.
THE ENGLISH COURT OF CRIMINAL APPEAL. ENGLAND has not yet got her Court of Criminal Appeal, although the Council of Judges, in their belated scheme of legal reform, recommend the legislature to create one. Questions whether an action should be dismissed as "frivolous or vexa tious," disputes about " security for costs" and the sufficiency of " interrogatories " or particulars," and all manner of trivial causes affecting property or status, are deemed by the law of England sufficiently important to entitle the parties to them, if dissatisfied with the finding of a court of first instance, to submit it to the touchstone of an appeal. But the lives and liberties of British subjects charged with the commis sion of criminal offences are in general disposed of irrevocably by the verdict of a jury, guided by the directions of a trial judge. To this rule, however, there are two leading exceptions. In the first place, any convicted prisoner may petition the sov ereign for a pardon, or for the commutation of his sentence; and the royal preroga tive of mercy is exercised through, and on the advice of the Secretary of State for the Home Department. In the second place, the English machine juridical, notwithstanding its lack of a properly constituted Court of Criminal Appeal, is furnished with a kind of "mechanical equivalent" therefor, in the "Court for Crown Cases Reserved," which was established by act of Parliament in 1848 (11 and 12 Viet. c. 78). This statute, after reciting that " it is ex pedient to provide a better mode than that now in use of deciding any difficult question of law which may arise in criminal trials 44
in any court of oyer and terminer and gaol delivery," enacts that when any person shall have been convicted of any treason, felony, or misdemeanor before any such court, the Judge or Commissioner or Justices of the Peace before whom the case shall have been tried may, in his or their discretion, reserve any question of law for the consideration of the justices of either bench and Barons of the Exchequer, and thereupon shall have authority to respite the execution of the judgment on such conviction, or postpone the judgment until such question shall have been considered and decided as he or they may think fit. The jurisdiction and au thority of this tribunal •— which is called the Court for Crown Cases Reserved — are now, under the Judicature Acts, vested in the judges of the High Court of Justice. and may be exercised by any five, or more of them, — the presence of the Lord ChiefJustice of England being essential unless he is unable from physical or other reason to attend. Questions of law are brought be fore the Court for Crown Cases Reserved on a case signed in the usual manner by the judge, commissioner, recorder, or jus tice granting it, and are argued like ordinary appeals, with this difference, however, that one of the parties, now the Crown and now the prisoner, is sometimes unrepresented by counsel, and the court has to arrive at its decision in such cases without the aid of forensic argument. The absence of Crown Counsel on the hearing of criminal appeals was the subject of strong animadversion by Lord Coleridge some years ago; and his lordship's criticism has, we believe, had a
