Cite as: 526 U. S. 227 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
1987); 4 Blackstone 238-239; A. Scott, Criminal Law in Colonial Virginia 27-28, 103-106 (1930).
Even in this system, however, competition developed between judge and jury over the real significance of their respective roles. The potential or inevitable severity of sentences was indirectly checked by juries' assertions of a mitigating power when the circumstances of a prosecution pointed to political abuse of the criminal process or endowed a criminal conviction with particularly sanguinary consequences. This power to thwart Parliament and Crown took the form not only of flat-out acquittals in the face of guilt but of what today we would call verdicts of guilty to lesser included offenses, manifestations of what Blackstone described as "pious perjury" on the jurors' part. 4 Blackstone 238-239.7
Countervailing measures to diminish the juries' power were naturally forthcoming, with ensuing responses both in the mother country and in the Colonies that validate, though they do not answer, the question that the Government's position here would raise. One such move on the Government's side was a parliamentary practice of barring the right to jury trial when defining new, statutory offenses. See, e. g., Frankfurter & Corcoran, Petty Federal Offenses and the Constitutional Guaranty of Trial by Jury, 39 Harv. L. Rev. 917, 925-930 (1926); 4 Blackstone 277-279. This practice extended to violations of the Stamp Act and recurred in statutes regulating imperial trade, see C. Ubbelohde, Vice-Admiralty Courts and the American Revolution 16-21, 74-80 (1960); Wroth, The Massachusetts Vice Admiralty Court, in
7 For English practice, see, e. g., Langbein, Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial, 50 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1, 22, 52-54 (1983); Green, The English Criminal Trial Jury, in The Trial Jury in England, France, Germany 1700-1900, pp. 41, 48-49 (A. Schioppa ed. 1987). For Colonial American practice, see, e. g., J. Goebell & T. Naughton, Law Enforcement in Colonial New York 673-674 (1944); State v. Bennet, 3 Brevard 515 (S. C. 1815).
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