LANGBEIN Quotes

“299 R. v. Inhabitants of Eriswell, 3 Term Rep. 707, 721, 100 Eng. Rep. 815, 823 (K.B. 1790). The case concerned the question of whether it had been error for a panel of magistrates to have received hearsay testimony in a Quarter Sessions proceeding concerning the settlement of a pauper. 300 Discussed in Langbein, “Evidence” 1173–4, 1181–4.”
― John H. Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial

“The implicit remedy for this one-sidedness, and the route that would be mapped out in the Treason Trials Act of 1696, was two-sidedness. The preamble to the Act would trumpet the principle of equalizing the defense, a principle that the Act would implement most fundamentally by allowing the defendant to have access to counsel both in the pretrial and at trial. Persons accused of treason would be allowed to defend themselves in the way the state prosecuted them, with lawyers. The accused would be allowed the help of lawyers to prepare defensive evidence in the pretrial, to examine defense witnesses and cross-examine prosecution witnesses, and to serve as advocates at trial.”
― John H. Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial

“The 1696 Act would provide for the right to consult lawyers in the pretrial for the purpose of developing defensive proofs, and for advance disclosure of the indictment and the names of prospective jurors.91 The Act did not, however, call for the disclosure of information about prosecution witnesses or their projected testimony, the step now known as pretrial discovery of the prosecution case. (Discovery of this sort would long be resisted, ostensibly for fear that persons allied with the defendant might intimidate or otherwise interfere with the accusing witnesses.)”
― John H. Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial

“William Ireland, one of the Popish Plot defendants charged with plotting the assassination of Charles II, spoke at trial about his inability to prepare a defense when imprisoned and unaided. He named alibi witnesses who could prove that he was in Staffordshire, far from the scene of Oates’ and Bedloe’s allegations. “[O]n calling his first witness he observed, ‘It is a hundred to one if he be here, for I have not been permitted so much as to send a scrap of paper.’ “87 His witnesses did not appear, and Ireland and his codefendants were convicted and executed.”
― John H. Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial

“The development of adversary criminal trial raised an acute theoretical challenge, which has never been satisfactorily resolved in the Anglo-American tradition: how to justify the truth-impairing tendencies of a procedure that remits to partisans the work of gathering and presenting the evidence upon which accurate adjudication depends.”
― John H. Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial