REPARATION TO INNOCENT CONVICTS. ^hg 



nals, and is echoed from the chairs of the learned ; but, after a brief 

 period of agitation, the current interest in the subject declines, other 

 events awaken sympathy or antipathy, and the want which the solution 

 of the question seemed destined to meet, aj^pears to have sunk into 

 abeyance. A third condition is also possible and not I'are ; it is that 

 science and investigation — even bee-busy German science and investi- 

 gation — may for years overlook the speculative problem and the real 

 need. 



The subject which now engages our attention, and the collateral one 

 of indemnihcation for unjust or unjustified arrests, have not been spared 

 fatalities of this kind. Under the passionate excitement aroused by 

 the judicial murder of Jean Galas, in France, to which Voltaire gave 

 a world-wide notoriety, public attention was turned with feverish 

 anxiety to the question of indemnifying persons who had suffered 

 under judicial sentence for offenses of which they had been found to 

 be innocent, although the subject had never yet been made a matter 

 of scientific consideration. The Academy of Chalons-sur-Marne made 

 its celebrated offer of prizes for the solution of the question. The sub- 

 ject had a place in the memorable portfolio of the deputies to the States- 

 General of 1789 ; and Louis XVI himself and his statesmen, a Necker 

 and a Pastoret, had it on their programmes. Excessively crude and ill- 

 considered attempts were made to solve it. Two of the prize-writers, 

 Brissot de Warville and Philippon de la Madeleine, proposed decora- 

 tions, especial rewards, and national honors for persons who had suf- 

 fered under unjust condemnation, as if the bearing of a wrong and 

 the rendering of a service stood on the same level ; as if the award of 

 distinctions and elevation in rank could be made adequate equivalents 

 for injuries inflicted by the mistakes of the state's agents. The vision- 

 ary mood of the French people subsided, the excitement passed away ; 

 and, although the question has never since been lost sight of in the 

 criminal literature of the country, it has not yet been solved. Napo- 

 leon III of his own initiative issued pardons in several cases in which 

 no right of appeal had been recognized in legislation. In Italy, a 

 mark was made by Filangieri's efforts to introduce reforms, and legis- 

 lative recognition of the right to indemnity was secui-ed for the first 

 time in the laws of Leopold II of Tuscany, and of Naples ; but the 

 question was overlooked in the codification of the laws of the new 

 kingdom, and the noble efforts of Carrara and Lucchini to secure con- 

 sideration of it have remained to this day without practical result. 

 In England, except for Jeremy Bentham, juridical literature is, so far 

 as we know, silent on the subject. Those acts of Parliament which 

 have awarded indemnities in cases of peculiar hardship, as in those of 

 the German preacher Hessel and of Bewicke, have advisedly left out 

 of sight the point of principle, which Lord Grey warned his country- 

 men was entirely sentimental and unapproachable. The cantonal 

 legislation of Switzerland, which Geyer has recently elucidated in a 



