The Presumption of Guilt and the English Law of Theft, 1750–1850

Abstract

When it is said that a defendant to a criminal charge is presumed to be innocent, what is really meant is that the burden of proving his guilt is upon the prosecution. This golden thread…runs through the web of the English criminal law. Unhappily Parliament regards the principle with indifference—one might almost say with contempt. The statute book contains many offences in which the burden of proving his innocence is cast on the accused.No principle in Anglo-American criminal law is more vaunted than the so-called “presumption of innocence”: the doctrine that the prosecution must bothproduceevidence of guilt andpersuadethe fact-finder “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The claim that “every man is presumed to be innocent until he is proved guilty” has been described as “dear to the hearts of Englishmen” and as an omnipresent feature of English criminal law. In 1895, the United States Supreme Court declared the “presumption of innocence in favor of the accused” to be “the undoubted law, axiomatic and elementary”—a protection that “lies at the foundation of the administration of our criminal law.” Befitting its lofty stature in Anglo-American legal culture, the presumption has become associated, over time, with that most famous of Blackstonean maxims: “[I]t is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.”