The Victorian era is often seen as solidifying modern law’s idealization of number, rule, and definition. Yet Wilkie Collins thwarts the trend toward “trial by mathematics” and “actuarial justice” by adopting an antinumerical example as the basis for a literary experiment. The bizarre third verdict (“not proven”) of Scots law, which falls between “guilty” and “not guilty” and acts as an acquittal that nonetheless imputes a lack of evidence for conviction, structures his detective novel The Law and the Lady (1875). Revealing Collins’s sources in trial reports and legal treatises, this chapter shows how uncertainty inflects judicial reasoning and models of reading. The verdict of “not proven” undercuts the truth claims of binary judgment at law, subverts normative categories, and allows for more flexible visions of social judgment. Collins makes visible a counter-trend to certainty and closure in legal institutions and Victorian novels about the law. The chapter briefly treats Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm (1862) and Mary Braddon’s An Open Verdict (1878), which also promote types of inference and models of critical judgment that value the tentative, hesitant, and processual, evading the calculative pressures of nineteenth-century law and life.

This chapter addresses the various legal and psychological factors that affect the decision-making process by which capital jurors reach penalty phase verdicts. Capital jury trials are unique in a number of respects, including the fact that jurors are selected through a special process of “death qualification,” consider a wide range of evidence that would otherwise be excluded in the typical criminal case, and, in the final analysis, must make the morally daunting decision of whether someone lives or dies. Social science research has documented the way that the very process of selecting a jury can affect capital jury decision-making processes, whether and how jurors consider the full range of evidence that is presented to them, the various ways that stereotypes, heuristics, and attributions might bias the sentencing verdicts ultimately rendered, and the “morally disengaging” aspects of the capital trial itself. Future research and policy implications are discussed.

Chapter 9 finally turns to the results of litigation in the courts of royal justice. Analysing the well-preserved books of orders and decrees made by the Court of Requests, this chapter asks how far this tribunal’s determinations met the expectations of petitioners, acknowledged the arguments of defendants, and subscribed to existing legal norms. It first surveys the changing circles of men who passed judgment in Requests, and considers the extent of their legal and judicial expertise. It then sets out the general formula of decrees recorded in this period, and what they can reveal about the processes of decision-making in this Court, the evidence it examined, and the awards within its gift. Finally, the chapter turns to the longer-term significance of rulings made within this burgeoning jurisdiction: assessing the signs of increasing caution about the scope of Requests’ powers, on the one hand, and the future utility of written royal decrees once they were in the hands of winning parties, on the other. In all, this chapter demonstrates that making the extraordinary powers of the Crown more ordinary meant balancing litigants’ demands with practical limitations.

The trials on 17-27 April, sentences on 28 April, and executions on Monday, 1 May counted among the greatest public sensations of the era. Adolphus’s brilliant defence rested on the conspiracy’s absurdity and the crown’s dependence on the evidence of the unreliable turncoat, Adams.Chief justice Abbott, an unlovely enemy of radicals, advised the jury to deliver guilty verdicts, which they did.Abbott then ordered eleven conspirators to be executed as traitors.Five, however, were shown ‘mercy’ and transported, and one had his sentence respited.Adolphus asked them all to write in their own hands memento passages for him to distribute to his cabinet friend in facsimile.