---
title: "pious perjury"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "term"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "pious perjury"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-07-09T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["William Blackstone","[[entity-bloody-code|Bloody Code]]","jury nullification","Old Bailey Proceedings Online","reasonable doubt (juror soul-protection)"]
---


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]]