3 March 1804

Evidence

Securities

Ch. Procedure Technical

''. Non-Confrontation

 [...?] This here or under Makeshift. Many Media[?]

''.1. Confrontation [...?] justice: abolition of it encourages mendacity by the multiplication of Agents through whom the information is transmitted

In the established system - in every system in which the truth of the allegation is not supported by the immediate testimony - the [...?] and scrutinized testimony of the party in whose name and on whose behalf it is advanced /made/ - mendacity receives the most adequate encouragement in its enterprises against justice.

The party say in the first instance the plaintiff tells his story in the first place to the Attorney. The bias which every man has in favour of his own cause is sufficient without conscious mendacity to produce more or less misrepresentation in the instance of privileges the majority of those who under /in/ the existing system come into a Court of law. Quantities are either encreased or diminished - qualities are either too strongly or too faintly coloured - often facts and circumstances that make against a man's wishes, especially if they reflect the /any/ slightest [...?] of disrepute upon his character - are more or less disguised or suppressed.

The Attorney who has no such /at least no equal/ bias upon his mind, shares not in any degree or at least in equal degree the false conception of his Client. But by the sinister interest constantly attached to his situation he so far from being urged to dispel the falshood and bring the truth to view, he is urgent to thicken it. He has every thing to hope and to gain without any thing to fear by keeping the mask on the falshood, every thing to lose by the removal of it. By extracting the truth from the Client, he loses the benefit at any rate of that one cause: if, in his endeavours /course of/ the operation he happens to give offence to a man the state of whose mind is such as disposes him more or less strongly to take offence, not only the cause is /may be/ lost, but the Client: not only that one cause, but other causes the indefinite train /source/ of other causes that might have flowed from this same source.