That's the start of this must-read article by CATO's Clark Neily. It starts like this:
“More weight!” Those are the famous—though perhaps apocryphal—last words of octogenarian farmer Giles Corey, who in 1692 was accused of being a witch and then pressed to death by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts when he refused to enter a plea to the charge. You might think we’d have made great progress in the ensuing 330 years when it comes to the government’s use of coercion against recalcitrant defendants, but you’d be wrong. Pressure is still the mainspring of American criminal justice—we just don’t use rocks and gravity to produce it anymore. Instead, we’ve refined our approach to make the application of pressure less bloody but still equally effective.
In this piece, I will explain how the confluence of an ancient Greek paradox and a famous common‐law maxim ravaged the Bill of Rights and destroyed the moral legitimacy of our criminal justice system in a way that should have self‐professed constitutional originalists reaching for the proverbial muskets above their mantelpieces. (Spoiler alert: They aren’t.)
But first, let’s get back to the unfortunate Giles Corey. Swept up in the hysteria of the Salem witch trials, Corey was accused of being a “dreadful wizard” who “grievously tormented” various neighbors while appearing to them as an apparition. Arrested and brought before a judge, Corey steadfastly refused to enter a plea of guilty or innocent, which both deprived the court of lawful jurisdiction to try the case and—this part is key from the government’s perspective—the ability to dispossess Corey’s heirs following his virtually inevitable conviction and execution. What to do?
It turns out Corey wasn’t the first person to pull this stunt, and the judiciary had a special procedure for defendants who stubbornly refused to submit themselves (and their estates) to the jurisdiction of the court. It was called peine forte et dure (roughly, “pain, good and hard,”), and it involved placing the defendant under a wooden plank and piling on rocks until they relented. Simple, brutal, and effective; but—disconcertingly from the government’s perspective—not infallible. Thus, Giles Corey expired without ever entering a plea and is said to have taunted his tormentors at the end by calling for “more rocks.” As for his heirs, they got his estate—not the Commonwealth.
So what does this have to do with our modern criminal justice system? In a word, everything. Because when it comes to dealing with obdurate defendants, we use the same basic approach that was inflicted on Giles Corey, namely, the incremental addition of pressure to elicit a desired plea. And that’s where the ancient Greek paradox and the common law maxim mentioned above enter the story. We’ll take them in reverse order.
