ABSTRACT
For an Englishman, a “trial by jury,” proclaimed Blackstone in his Commentaries just a year before the massacre, “is the grand bulwark of his liberties.” 60 Trial by jury was a vote of confidence in the ability of untrained men to weigh evidence, understand the concept of reasonable doubt, distinguish the probable from the improbable, and know when circumstantial evidence might be sufficient to warrant a conviction. There might be no reliable eyewitnesses for jurors to rely on; irrefutable evidence was a rarity. And yet these “good and lawful” men, even if they did not themselves pronounce sentence, were expected to decide questions of life and death.
