"It is better five guilty persons escape, than one innocent person
suffer."

Lord Chancellor Fortescue, you see, carries the matter further, and
says:--

"Indeed, one had rather, much rather, that twenty guilty persons
should escape than one innocent person suffer capitally."

Indeed, this rule is not peculiar to the English law; there never
was a system of laws in the world in which this rule did not
prevail. It prevailed in the ancient Roman law, and, which is more
remarkable, it prevails in the modern Roman law. Even the judges in
the Courts of Inquisition, who with racks, burnings, and scourges
examine criminals,--even there they preserve it as a maxim, that
it is better the guilty should escape punishment than the innocent
suffer. _Satius_ _esse_ _nocentem_ _absolvi_ _quam_ _innocentem_
_damnari_. This is the temper we ought to set out with, and these
the rules we are to be governed by. And I shall take it for granted,
as a first principle, that the eight prisoners at the bar had better
be all acquitted, though we should admit them all to be guilty, than
that any one of them should, by your verdict, be found guilty, being
innocent.

I shall now consider the several divisions of law under which the
evidence will arrange itself.

The action now before you is homicide; that is, the killing of one
man by another. The law calls it homicide; but it is not criminal in
all cases for one man to slay another. Had the prisoners been on the