By What Authority - Holy Experiment

American Political History · May 1, 2022 · 23m

In 1670 a London jury was locked up without food, water, or heat and ordered to convict a young Quaker named William Penn. They refused — and the ruling that followed made the independence of juries a foundation stone of the fair trial. Penn knew, in his own body, what arbitrary power felt like: the admiral's son thrown out of Oxford, disowned, jailed in the Tower, where he swore his prison would be his grave before he would surrender his conscience. Eleven years later the King of England, settling a debt to Penn's late father and glad to export a troublesome sect, handed him a piece of…