Political Theory and the Growth of Defensive Safeguards in Criminal Procedure: The Origins of the Treason Trials Act of 1696

Abstract

The Act for Regulating of Trials in Cases of Treason passed by Parliament in 1696 (the Trials Act) commands a central place in the history of criminal procedure. Addressing a serious imbalance in treason trial procedure that favored the prosecution over the defense, the Trials Act established a set of procedural safeguards for the treason defendant that eventually became paramount elements of English due process. While much legal scholarship has concentrated on the legacy of this legislation in the eighteenth-century criminal trial, only a few historians have attempted to account for the act's origins in the seventeenth century, and none have linked this moment of legal change with contemporary developments in political theory.