Criminal Appeals as Jury Control: An Anglo-Canadian Historical Perspective on the Rise of Criminal Appeals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The appeal plays a central role in the modern Canadian criminal justice system. Appellate rulings are the primary means by which, through the assessment of trial error, substantive criminal law and the law of evidence evolve and develop. Scarcely more than a century ago, however, formal criminal appeals were unknown to Anglo-Canadian criminal procedure. What provoked the creation of a criminal appellate procedure? Why and how did criminal appeals emerge in Canada at the end of the 19th century? Answers to these questions can enrich our appreciation of the essential nature and function of the modern criminal appeal. This article examines the 19th century English debates on the establishment of a criminal appeal and places these debates in the context of the loss of the old forms of jury control in the 18th century. The author shows that the emergence of the criminal appeal was closely tied to a 19th century debate between the judges of England and members of the legal profession about the frailties of trial by jury and the need for a new means of trial error correction. The author argues that, accordingly, the modern criminal appeal is best understood as, at core, a mechanism of jury control.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".