Talk:Custom of the sea

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St Christopher case[edit]

The St Christopher case seems very dubious to me. The section claims "the judge pardoned them". But pardon is part of the royal prerogative of mercy; judges do not have the power of pardon. Nor could he have acquitted them: in a murder case, the trial must be by jury, so it would be the jury that acquitted, not the judge. There are also no names given for the defendants or their victim. All of this was true of English law already in the 17th century. I strongly suspect the story is apocryphal. Hairy Dude (talk) 22:46, 26 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Might be worth checking out what the source (Simpson 1984, pp. 122–123) has to saw about this case. Maybe some of the details got mangled in our summary. Gawaon (talk) 18:03, 29 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I've now checked what exactly Simpson says about this case and have adapted the section accordingly. All in all our old account was already quite accurate, except for a garbled sentence about "a post-1884 medical work" – actually it was a 1641 medical work, and Dutch rather than British. The judge's "pardon" is explicitly mentioned, and no jury is mentioned. I suppose English law in newly established colonies might not always have closely corresponded to the ideals formulated on the mainland, or else Tulp, being Dutch, might have made a mistake in his case summary. But we must stick to what the sources say, and Simpson doesn't seem to consider these details as problematic. Gawaon (talk) 12:37, 17 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]