One of the last cases where clergy was recognized, in the United States, was in a Kentucky case.[52] A negro was convicted of rape upon a white woman, after a trial had before Judge Buckner, in Bonner County, at Glasgow. Under the statute, the punishment to be assessed was death and the judge believed the defendant innocent of the crime for which he had been convicted. The defendant’s counsel claimed the benefit of clergy for him and the defendant was found able to read the Constitution of the United States and he was accordingly burned in the hand and discharged. These instances are not nearly all that could be found in England or the United States to illustrate the application of this exemption from crime, at common law, but the random cases mentioned will show the general recognition of the privilege until comparatively recent times. There is no doubt but what the benefit of clergy bred much crime and operated, for centuries, as a great impediment in the impartial enforcement of the criminal laws of England and the United States. Like the right of sanctuary, established by the early Saxon kings, the benefit of clergy owed its existence to the fact that the law’s redress of wrongs was, at an early period in the history of the world, inadequate to protect the educated class from the ambition and cupidity of the race and in the dangerous games for place and power then waged, these privileges were very dear to Englishmen and on the whole, were strictly respected. Judged by modern standards, the exemption of the clergy, enlarged to include all those who could read, from the punishment that others, similarly situated, were subjected to, who were not so fortunate as to be able to read, seems an anomaly in the administration of any system of justice; but it must be accepted as a mere incident of the barbarous period when the privilege was applied. As a doctrine of the common law, it illustrates the fallibility of all institutions of man, both in and out of the holy orders. The privilege had neither justice nor reason for its foundation, but, like the practice of witchcraft, enchantment and the belief in ghosts, so prevalent during the same period, it owed its existence to the ignorance and superstition of that civilization. Because of such an unjust practice the common law is not to be condemned, any more than is the literature of the same period of English history, because of the introduction of ghosts, witchcraft and enchantment, into the literary masterpieces of the past centuries, for these beliefs were prevalent at that time.