Charles Dickens wrote about how corrupt the courts were out of control in Bleak House published back in 1859. He began in his first chapter on Chancery:
“This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, ‘Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!’”
The rule of law is so dangerous when it lies in the hands of government for inevitably it has historically ALWAYS been abused for political purposes with perhaps one of the most famous cases being that of the trial of Socrates for effectively knowing too much. I paid my respect at the cell where Socrates died in Athens. Torture was legal in England as in the American Colonies. If a charged person refused to plead to the crime the government demanded, he was subjected to peine forte et dure, which meant that he would be subjected to having heavier and heavier stones placed upon his or her chest until a plea was entered, or he/she died.
Many defendants who were charged with a felony, which was a capital offense, refused to plead in order to avoid forfeiture of property for their family.
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