§ On the order of the day for the third reading of the Scotch Juries bill,
§ Mr. Home Drummondsaid, he was sorry to be obliged to state, in this late stage of the bill, objections that went rather to the details than to the principle of the measure. But he had been deprived of the means of making these objections to the proper stage, when it was in the committee. He differed little in principle from the hon. member who brought in the bill, and he knew that the principles on which it was the object of the hon. and learned gentleman to legislate were approved of by the House. But he thought the bill, in its present shape, 936 would lead to inextricable difficulties, and great embarrassment in practice. He said, that though he was not aware of any practical evil that had resulted from the present system of nomination of juries by the judges, he thought it objectionable in theory, and should not defend it, as the opinion of the House had been repeatedly expressed on the subject. It appeard to him perfectly practicable to introduce an unexceptionable substitute for this practice, by arranging the lists of jurors into classes of landed men burgesses, & c. and balloting a number, to be fixed, out of each class. In this way that great excellence of the present system would be preserved, by which, from every jury containing a portion of every different class of society, both prosecutors and prisoners were preserved from the prejudices and biasses of any one description of persons, and juries were in reality a sort of representatives of the country. He hoped it would be kept in mind, that the juries about which the House was legislating, came in place of all grand and petty juries, of all common and special juries, in all crimes, whether felonies or misdemeanours; and therefore it was of the utmost importance to guard well the manner of proceeding. The regulations about parishes and columns were likely to be attended with no other effect than creating trouble and difficulty in conducting trials. All this first part of the bill appeared to have been framed on the idea of there being no ballot, but a system of rotation in the selection of juries; and when it was afterwards determined to insert the clauses about ballot, it did not seem to have occurred to the hon. member to remove the other clauses, originally drawn with a different view. If the principal gentlemen of the country were to be summoned from the remotest parts of counties, to try an old woman before the sheriff for stealing a shirt from a hedge, was it expected they would come as they did under the present system, from a feeling he had often admired of public duty, from great distances, at much expense and inconvenience? Penalties might be resorted to, but he thought them a bad substitute for public spirit; and it was likely the bill would operate as an objection to jury trials before the inferior courts. Many of the regulations were expressed, even in matters of the smallest consequence, in such peremptory language, that the displacing 937 a name, or mistaking a parish, or the most trifling variation, might often stop the whole proceedings of a circuit court. He thought there was already too much obstruction to the course of justice in criminal trials in Scotland from technical niceties, which it was the duty of the prisoner's counsel to enforce; and this bill was calculated greatly to aggravate the evil. The hon. member commented at considerable length on the different clauses of the bill, which he described as cumbersome and useless, and pointed out various inconsistencies and imperfections, to which he objected in detail. It seemed very strange that one important clause of the bill should be so expressed as to extend to all trials, whether civil or criminal, before the inferior courts; another, about objections to jurors, was quite unintelligible, and seemed to confer a power to sustain objections to all the jurors that were applicable to any one of them. He was not stating these as insurmountable obstacles; on the contrary, they might easily have been removed in a committee; but certainly the bill, in its present shape, was in a very unfit state to pass into a law, and would do little credit to the House, or to those who framed it.
The bill was read a third time and passed.