Page:Illegality of the trial of John W. Webster - Spooner - 1850.pdf/23

15 To conclude. It is plain, that if the more humane and conscientious persons can be discharged from the panel, on account of their revolting against the barbarity of the laws, which they are called upon to aid in enforcing, an accused person does not have a trial by "the country," but only by the more inhuman and unfeeling portion of it.

Suppose the statute were to prescribe the penalty of death for a theft of forty shillings, (as it has sometimes done in England.) Probably not one man in ten in this Commonwealth would consent to be sworn to try a person accused of such a theft. In such a case, could all the men who were thus scrupulous, be excluded from the panel, or even be discharged at their own request, until a jury were packed entirely of men so brutal as to be willing to have a man hanged for stealing forty shillings? Certainly not, I think. And if not, then men cannot be discharged at all, on account of their opposition to such penalties as may be prescribed by statute; and whenever men, drawn as jurors, refuse to be sworn to try a case, on account of the penalty annexed to the offence to be tried, the trial must, in the first instance, be postponed until, at some subsequent term of the court, a jury drawn in the usual way, shall be found, who will swear to try the case. If such a jury can never be found, the trial must stop, until that penalty be changed for