law. Moreover, the decision of a Court of Criminal Appeal would tie the hands of the Home Secretary in the exercise of the pre rogative of mercy. It would be almost im possible for him to reduce a sentence after it had been confirmed by the Court. And this question needs an answer: How can the power of reviewing an acquittal be logically withheld from a Court empowered to review a conviction? The law is certainly as much concerned with the punishment of the guilty as with setting the innocent free, and juries are not less prone to error in acquitting than in convicting a prisoner. ONE interesting point on the question of appeal in criminal cases is brought out by the Lai<.' Times (London), which says : The proposal that a power of appeal should be granted from the verdicts of juries in matters of fact in criminal cases intro duces, when rightly understood, no novel principle in the law or the Constitution of the country; it would, if carried into effect, merely make the supervision which the Con stitution vested in the King's Bench Divi sion over other criminal tribunals a reality and not a mere name, by giving the power of correcting, not merely mistakes in point of form, but those errors that actually af fected the substantial justice of the proceed ings. This position was thus explained and illustrated by Mr. Butt in moving in the House of Commons the second reading of a New Trials (Criminal Cases) Bill on June i, 1853:
The law and the Constitution [said Mr. Butt] invested the Court of Queen's Bench with the superintendence and control of all inferior criminal jurisdictions—that is, of all courts except the House of Lords or the Court of the Lord High Steward for the trial of a peer. This was the principle of the law. The Court of Queen's Bench had the power to correct the erroneous judgments of all other courts. But how was this limited and made a nullity in practice? Only by this —that the Court of Queen's Bench could only know what passed in the other courts by that which is called the record—that is, the formal entry of the proceedings on parchment. The record, however, conveyed about as much information of the proceed ings as the Votes, published each morning did of the debates in that House; it showed the charge, the finding of the jury, and the sentence, but it did not show one particle of the evidence or the rulings of the judg-e. What, then, was the result? That the power of supervision in the Court of Queen's Bench was limited to errors which, in technical lan guage, appeared on the record. No matter whether the error was important or minute, if it found its way into the formal entry of the proceedings then it became matter for the correction of an appellate tribunal, even if it were only the misprision of a clerk. The gravest errors which did not so find their way, the court, which the law nomi nally invested with complete control, had no power either to remedy or correct.
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