ABSTRACT
The Jury's Rise as Lie Detector says that the trial procedure from the second half of the seventeenth century had begun to resemble the modern one. Unsworth, Witchcraft Beliefs and Criminal Procedure in Early Modern England, Legal Record and Historical Reality. It Proceedings of the Eighth British Legal History Conference, Cardiff, 1987. The procedure and evidence law and the structure of the legal system, which seem so obvious now, were just coming into being between the years 1550 and 1750. Shapiro displays how the emergent law of evidence interrelated with transforming notions of science, religion and philosophy about proof and facts. Procedures and proof mechanisms were not self-evident, but a subject of debate. A series of scandalous treason trials during the seventeenth century left a bitter impression of injustice and led to an improvement of defendant's procedural rights. Treason Trials Act of 1696 mandated that in treason cases the accused should have a copy of the indictment before trial.
