The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of AnimalsEvans, E. P. (Edward Payson)
History
The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals
Evans, E. P. (Edward Payson)
Animals -- Law and legislation -- History; Animals, Prosecution and punishment of -- History; Trials -- Europe
That the feeling, which found expression in such enactments and usages and
survives in schemes of expiation and vicarious sacrifice, lies scarcely
skin-deep under the polished surface of our civilization, is evident from
the force and suddenness with which it breaks out under strong excitement,
as when Cincinnati rioters burn the court-house because they suspect the
judges of venality and are dissatisfied with the verdicts of the juries.
The primitive man and the savage, like the low and ignorant masses of
civilized communities, do not take into consideration whether the objects
from which they suffer injury are intelligent agents or not, but wreak
their vengeance on stocks and stones and brutes, obeying only the rude
instinct of revenge. The power of restraining these aboriginal
propensities, and of nicely analyzing actions and studying mental
conditions in order to ascertain degrees of moral responsibility,
presupposes a high degree of mental development and refinement and great
acuteness of psychological perception, and is, in fact, only a recent
acquisition of a small minority of the human race. The vast bulk of
mankind will have to pass through a long process of intellectual
evolution, and rise far above their present place in the ascending scale
of culture before they attain it.
For this reason Lombroso would abolish trial by jury, which seems to him
not a sign of progress towards better judicatory methods, but a clumsy
survival of primitive justice as administered by barbarous tribes and even
gregarious animals. It makes the administration of justice dependent upon
popular prejudice and passion, and finds its most violent expression or
explosion in lynch law, which is only trial by a jury of the whole
community gone mad. It would certainly be a dismal farce to apply to the
criminal classes the principle that every man must be judged by his peers.
In the cantonal courts of Switzerland the verdict of the jury is uniformly
in favour of the native against the foreigner, no matter what the merits
of the case may be; and this outrageous perversion of right and equity is
called patriotism, a term which conveniently sums up and euphemizes the
general sentiment of Helvetian innkeepers and tradesmen that “the stranger
within their gates” is their legitimate spoil, and has no other _raison
d’être_. In Italy, especially in Naples and Sicily, a thief may be
sometimes condemned, but a murderer is almost invariably acquitted by the
jury, whose decision expresses the corrupted moral sense of a people
accustomed to admire the bandit as a hero and to consider brigandage a
highly honourable profession.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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