Penal servitude From at least the 17th century, the
Kingdom of England and its successor states maintained the penalty of
transportation to English colonies for felons. Originally these colonies were in North America, and
after the loss of most such colonies transportation moved to Australia. Non-felon settlers in Australia began to resent the transportation of felons to their lands, however, so the practice was abolished in 1852. In its stead arose a system of
penal servitude; while such servitude could be and sometimes was for a productive purpose, more often than not it was meaningless labour intended to be physically exhausting, such as the
penal treadmill. By the mid-1930s, most servitude was of the latter type, being in public prisons.
Corporal and capital punishment Both
corporal punishment and
capital punishment had long been staples in British criminal law; death was the mandatory sentence for many offences since time immemorial, as was whipping.
Trial of peers by peers Mediaeval courts were limited in their scope; lords generally held their own courts, which had jurisdiction over the lord's subjects. The king's main advisors, who would in time evolve into the peerage, were subjects directly to the King and so could only be tried by royal courts. Eager to limit royal authority wherever possible, mediaeval barons asserted for themselves the right to be tried only by fellow barons rather than the usual royal courts. A statutory authorisation of this right that would have granted peers the option, but not requirement, to be tried by peers was passed in 1391 but quickly repealed under royal pressure. The 1391 repeal, combined with the practical inability of peers to secure the right to try peers for any and every offence, ended up forming a settlement that peers were required to be tried in the House of Lords for treason and felony, and could not waive such a trial in favour of a trial by jury. Technically speaking, the House of Lords tried such trials only when Parliament was in session, and the Court of the
Lord High Steward tried them at other times. This latter court comprised those lords, known as "Lords Triers", whom the monarch empowered for the purpose. Monarchs could and did empower peers favourable to their desired verdict to the court, but this ended when Parliament passed the
Treason Act 1695 (
7 & 8 Will. 3. c. 3) requiring that all peers be summoned to the court, rendering the two courts virtually indistinguishable. In practice, this trial was far more a detriment than a privilege for accused peers. Whereas a commoner could challenge certain individuals from being empanelled in his or her jury, peers had no such right since all lords were involved in the deliberations and verdict of the court. Furthermore, whilst a commoner could appeal a decision to higher courts, the House of Lords was
the highest court in the land so no appeal was possible for a convicted peer except for royal pardon. Nor were there any substantial benefits in terms of sentencing compared to a commoner convicted of the same offence; the privilege of a peer to be excused for the first offence he committed other than murder or treason was abolished in 1841, and the vote of the Lords to determine the punishment of the convicted was constrained by law. In addition, the actual proceedings of such trials were almost invariably controlled by the advice of royal justices, the same people who tried commoners; as early as the 18th century, the Lord High Steward asked a justice for advice on all but one of his motions and decisions. The persistence of these trials was in large part because so few of them occurred in latter centuries;
only one in the 19th century, and only two in the 20th; of
Earl Russell for
bigamy in 1901, and the last in 1935, when
Lord de Clifford, both distant relatives, was charged with vehicular manslaughter. In a display of the farcical nature of such trials, the only deliberation of the House was to ask the attorney his opinion on the case before unanimously voting to acquit de Clifford based on his answer. By the mid-1930s, the majority opinion of the Lords was that the privilege ought to be abolished; the holders of this view were generally holders of recently-created peerages who chafed at the burden imposed on them, whereas the minority who defended the practice were generally holders of older peerages who considered it a privilege of the House as a whole. In 1936, the former Lord Chancellor
Viscount Sankey proposed, and the House voted, to abolish the privilege, but the government did not give time for the motion to be considered by the Commons before the session ended. A similar vote was passed in the Lords in 1937 but likewise died in the Commons. == Legislative history ==