Cite as: 530 U. S. 466 (2000)
Opinion of the Court
stone 369-370 (after verdict, and barring a defect in the indictment, pardon, or benefit of clergy, "the court must pronounce that judgment, which the law hath annexed to the crime" (emphasis added)).
Thus, with respect to the criminal law of felonious conduct, "the English trial judge of the later eighteenth century had very little explicit discretion in sentencing. The substantive criminal law tended to be sanction-specific; it prescribed a particular sentence for each offense. The judge was meant simply to impose that sentence (unless he thought in the circumstances that the sentence was so inappropriate that he should invoke the pardon process to commute it)." Lang-bein, The English Criminal Trial Jury on the Eve of the French Revolution, in The Trial Jury in England, France, Germany 1700-1900, pp. 36-37 (A. Schioppa ed. 1987).5 As
Blackstone, among many others, has made clear,6 "[t]he judg-5 As we suggested in Jones v. United States, 526 U. S. 227 (1999), juries devised extralegal ways of avoiding a guilty verdict, at least of the more severe form of the offense alleged, if the punishment associated with the offense seemed to them disproportionate to the seriousness of the conduct of the particular defendant. Id., at 245 ("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").
6 As the principal dissent would chide us for this single citation to Black-stone's third volume, rather than his fourth, post, at 525-526 (opinion of O'Connor, J.), we suggest that Blackstone himself directs us to it for these purposes. See 4 Blackstone 343 ("The antiquity and excellence of this [jury] trial, for the settling of civil property, has before been explained at large"). See 3 id., at 379 ("Upon these accounts the trial by jury ever has been, and I trust ever will be, looked upon as the glory of the English law. And, if it has so great an advantage over others in regulating civil property, how much must that advantage be heightened, when it is applied to criminal cases!"); 4 id., at 343 ("And it will hold much stronger in criminal cases; since, in times of difficulty and danger, more is to be apprehended from the violence and partiality of judges appointed by the crown, in suits between the king and the subject, than in disputes between one individual and another, to settle the metes and boundaries of private property");
479
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