pious perjury

The term Georgian England's jurors and jurists used for a specific act of institutionalized mercy: a jury lying under oath about the value of stolen goods so a defendant would fall under a capital threshold. Blackstone uses the phrase himself in the Commentaries (Book IV, ch. 17) for jurors undervaluing goods below the twelvepence grand-larceny line; the term is also applied, on a Tier 2 source (Robert Shoemaker, Old Bailey Proceedings Online), to undervaluation against the separate 40-shilling dwelling-house capital threshold. The vault treats these as the same instinct — a legal system's own enforcers quietly refusing to run its stated severity — expressed as action rather than doctrine, and sitting beside the juror-conscience question in claim-whitman-reasonable-doubt-began-as-juror-soul-protection.

References

• claim-georgian-juries-undervalued-stolen-goods-to-avoid-the-death-penalty
• claim-duglass-1750-old-bailey-case-cited-as-39-shilling-undervaluation
• claim-englands-bloody-code-made-petty-property-theft-a-capital-crime
• Related hub: entity-william-blackstone · entity-old-bailey-proceedings-online