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towards the prisoner, and this would not provide for cases where 
fresh circumstances had come to light since the trial, as the judge 
would probably have to act upon the notes he had taken at the 
trial. 
In the next place, it has been proposed to give the Secretary of 
State power to grant a newtrial. Here again the Secretary of 
State would be largely influenced by the judge who tried the case. 
At the present time he is so influenced in questions of reprieve, to 
a very great extent. 
It is obvious that this suggestion would not help matters much; 
and the only way to settle the question would be to allow all 
convicted prisoners the right of appeal to a Court of Appeal com- 
posed of several judges, who would have power to order a fresh 
trial if a case was made out. 
At the present time there is a sort of private appeal to the 
Home Secretary, who can advise Her Majesty to reprieve a 
prisoner sentenced to death, to remit a sentence altogether, or to 
curtail an imprisonment. This appeal is made to a political 
person who has an enormous weight of other duties to perform, 
and who naturally refers to the judge who tried the case; and this 
judge may have been absolutely wrong in the direction of his 
remarks in his summing up, and may have misled the jury com- 
pletely. The private nature of the present mode of appeal is 
objectionable, as it is rarely known upon what grounds the convict 
is reprieved or the Queen’s pardon granted. ‘Ihe proposal at the 
present time—although it has not been put into a practical form— 
is to establish a Court of Criminal Appeal, consisting of five or 
more judges, and to this Court, I take it, all prisoners convicted 
would have power to appeal for a new trial. 
It is in cases of death sentence, however, that the Court of 
Appeal would have considerable difficulty, because, in this country, 
so short a time is allowed between a death sentence and the 
execution. Here an appeal would have to be made at once; and 
one can quite understand that in every case of death sentence 
there would be an appeal made—in some cases probably with no 
other object than to postpone the carrying out of the execution ; 
