THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. TUESDAY, JUNE 5, 1906.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8154, 5 June 1906, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. TUESDAY, JUNE 5, 1906.

The proposal to establish a Court of Appeal for criminal oases in Great Britain has met with vigorous opposition in many quarters, and some of the most weighty oritioi im has come from the pree enc judges. Under the existing law, the parties to a civil aotion may appeal to a higher Court if they consider that they are suffering under an injustice, but the man convicted of a criminal offense has no right of appeal. Several cases of the conviction and imprisonment of innooent men have come prominently before the British public during late ye<us, and the result has been an agitation for the establishment of a Court of

Criminal Appeal, under a Bill brought forward by the Lord Chancellor. Mr Justice Eigbara last month made a stormy attack on the proposal from the Bench at Manchester, Be said that for centuries past the English people had exercised a dominant control in the administration of the criminal law. It bad been their exclusive right to determine the question of the innocence or guilt of a man—to vindicate the law where the law had been broken, to set free the accused where the crime was not brought home to him. With the verdict of the people no judge or court of lawyers had hitherto had any right to interfere. "This close connection between the public at large and the administration of jus* tice should be jealously guarded aad preserved," said Mr Justioe Bigham. "It has made the law popular in the best sense of the word. It has given to the people a sense of security, and it has placed the judgments of the Court above criticism, because it based them on the assent of the public. From the days of the Great Cnarter our Constitution has approved and maintained the principle that the question of the guilt or innocence of an aocused man should be left to the determination of liis peers, and that their judgment should be final. The new Bill proposes to violate that principle, and to giv* an appeal from a verdict of a jury on questions of fact. The appeal is to be a court of three lawyers, and their decision, or the decision of two out of the three, is alone to have the finality wbiob at present attaches to the verdict of the jury. The faint possibility of the improbable mistake of a jury being corrected by a court of two or three lawyers offers, in my opinion, no compensation for the mischief whioh the contemplated Oour*; of Appeal may introduce."