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Introduction
In February 1844, Robert Peel’s Tory Party succeeded in getting Daniel O’Connell MP, the outspoken but peaceful Irish rights activist, convicted by a Dublin jury on eleven charges of ‘seditious conspiracy’. That May, O’Connell was sentenced to a year in gaol; but four months later the sentence was quashed by the House of Lords, in a landmark decision for jury trials throughout the United Kingdom.
THE jury, in O’Connell’s case, was really what we would now call “fixed.” The recorder (or whoever it was who made up the jury-list before it was handed over to the sheriff) cut out one third of the names, and the effect was to exclude jurors politically attached to O’Connell. The argument of the majority was that a challenge to the array* only obtains for errors made by the sheriff, and that it could not be sustained when the polls were tampered with by persons who prepared them for the sheriff.
Of this subterfuge we may justly say, adopting Lord Denman’s words in his famous judgment in the House of Lords,* when the case was finally decided:
“If it is possible that such a practice as that which has taken place in the present instance should be allowed to pass without a remedy (and no other remedy than that of the challenge to the array has been suggested), trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, will be a mockery, a delusion, and a snare.”
* A ‘challenge to the array’ is an objection by the defence to the composition of the whole jury.
* Thomas Denman (1779-1854), 1st Baron Denman, who served as Lord Chief Justice from 1832 to 1850.
Précis
In 1844, the Government made sure that firebrand Irish rights activist Daniel O’Connell was charged with seditious conspiracy, and that dozens of potential jurors sympathetic to his politics were ruthlessly weeded out. When this became known, some high-profile lawyers argued that it breached no law, but Lord Denman roundly condemned it as making a mockery of jury trials. (58 / 60 words)
In 1844, the Government made sure that firebrand Irish rights activist Daniel O’Connell was charged with seditious conspiracy, and that dozens of potential jurors sympathetic to his politics were ruthlessly weeded out. When this became known, some high-profile lawyers argued that it breached no law, but Lord Denman roundly condemned it as making a mockery of jury trials.
Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 65 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 55 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: although, if, may, or, otherwise, unless, until, whereas.
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