Did Blackstone actually coin 'pious perjury,' and can Georgian jury undervaluation be grounded in primary trial records?

claim-georgian-juries-undervalued-stolen-goods-to-avoid-the-death-penalty rests on two things that secondary sources assert but no primary here confirms: (1) that William Blackstone coined the term "pious perjury," and (2) the specific arithmetic of jurors valuing goods at 39 shillings to duck a 40-shilling capital threshold. Both currently ride on a Tier-4 Wikipedia entry plus Oxford Reference. An attribution of a named coinage and a load-bearing quantitative example should sit on the primary.

What would answer it

• William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book IV (Of Public Wrongs), c. 1769 — locate the passage where he discusses jurors under-assessing value and confirm whether he uses the phrase "pious perjury" himself. Capture the verbatim sentence if so.
• Old Bailey Online (oldbaileyonline.org) — the capture flagged that the trial-search interface returned 403 on direct fetch; retry via a different access path. Pull actual named theft trials (ideally instrument or metal theft) showing juries returning below-threshold valuations, to ground the practice in real cases rather than the general pattern.
• A standard secondary on eighteenth-century criminal justice (e.g. Radzinowicz, or Beattie's Crime and the Courts in England 1660-1800) to gauge how common "partial verdicts" / downvaluation actually were.

Why it matters

The Blackstone coinage and the shilling example are the two most quotable elements of the note and the two least verified. Confirming them against the Commentaries and Old Bailey records would let the note shed its [unverified-quote] flag; it would also deliver the "one primary Old Bailey case" the capture itself named as the gap between this being a clean hop and being publication-ready.

Update 2026-07-12 (cross-model audit, claude-fable-5)

Part (1) is answered: Blackstone uses the phrase himself — Commentaries, Book IV, ch. 17 ("Of Offences Against Private Property"), verified against the Avalon Project full text: "the mercy of juries will often make them strain a point, and bring in larciny to be under the value of twelvepence, when it is really of much greater value: but this is a kind of pious perjury." Note his example is the twelvepence grand-larceny threshold, and he does not connect undervaluation to the 40s dwelling-house threshold anywhere in the chapter. Part (2) — the 39-/40-shilling arithmetic and a named Old Bailey case — remains open: oldbaileyonline.org still returns 403 on direct fetch (as does Oxford Reference), so the quantitative example is still unverified. One correction landed on the claim-note the same day: the Wikipedia "Bloody Code" entry carries neither the coinage attribution nor the shilling example, contrary to what this question (and the note) previously stated; both rode in from the capture's search synthesis.