Catalogue description Records relating to the Court for the Consideration of Crown Cases Reserved

Details of Division within CRIM
Reference: Division within CRIM
Title: Records relating to the Court for the Consideration of Crown Cases Reserved
Description:

Records of cases referred from the Central Criminal Court to the Court for the Consideration of Crown Cases Reserved.

Pleadings from the Central Criminal Court are in CRIM 11; orders from the Court for Crown Cases Reserved are in CRIM 12

Date: 1848-1908
Related material:

Cases stated to the Court for the Consideration of Crown Cases Reserved are in KB 30

Orders of the court from 1853 to 1856 in KB 31

Legal status: Public Record(s)
Language: English
Physical description: 2 series
Administrative / biographical background:

The traditional reluctance of the judiciary to overturn jury verdicts in criminal trials resulted in judges reserving judgment pending informal discussion of difficult points of law with their colleagues in Serjeants' Inn. Such proceedings, which on the civil side were dealt with more formally by the sittings of the judges in banc or in banco, ceased to be necessary with the passage of the Crown Cases Act 1848 which provided that, subject to the consent of the judge who tried the prisoner to state a case, questions of law (except in the case of demurrers and writs of error) could be referred to no less than five judges drawn from the superior courts of common law. Of this number at least one was to be either the Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Queen's Bench, the Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, or the Lord Chief Baron of the Court of Exchequer.

When considering such questions of law the justices and barons came to be described as sitting in the Court for the Consideration of Crown Cases Reserved. The limited nature of criminal appeal procedure was left unchanged by the Supreme Court of Judicature Act 1873 but jurisdiction under the act of 1848 was transferred to the judges of the High Court. This, in turn, passed to the newly-established Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907 when a fundamental reform in criminal appeal procedure took place under the Criminal Appeal Act 1907.

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