Evidence

30 June 1805

Introd

Regular useless

(3) . Jury

By the previous intervention of the operations /inquiry conducted on the play/ of summary procedure, Jury Trial might itself be rendered in a prodigious /no small/ degree more subservient /better adapted/ than it is at present to the purpose of justice.

All facts about which there is no dispute, of which there are sometimes many in a cause, would of course be set down as proved: of so much of the inquiry as concerned those /all such/ facts the inquiry before the Jury would thus be disembarrassed.

Cases will sometimes happen which afford a number of facts which being either altogether unconnected or at least easily separable from each other without inconvenience, would compose give birth to a mass of evidence too large to be compressed into the compless of a single hearing. Under the existing order of things a case of this description is either by one means or other withdrawn altogether from the cognisance of a Jury, or if tried by a Jury badly tried, the Jury not having time so much as to hear all the evidence, much less digest it in their minds.