Justice in criminal trials

This paper discusses Anscombe’s short co-authored 1972 article, ‘On the Nature of Justice in a Trial’, which was a highly critical response to a suggestion from the Criminal Law Revision Committee that the professional privilege that allows lawyers to refuse to reveal information given them in confidence by their clients should not formally be extended to priests who receive information in a confession. Section 1 discusses the conflict between the state’s demand that information about serious crimes be divulged, and the Church’s demand that the confessional remain sacrosanct (between the demands of Caesar and those of God)—a conflict that the state cannot allow itself to lose. Section 2 turns to more general questions about the nature of justice in a criminal trial, and about the constraints that should be set on the means used to acquire evidence for the trial: it discusses the inadequacy (as Anscombe argued) of any purely instrumentalist account of such constraints, and sketches an alternative view on which they are integral to the proper purposes of the trial as a procedure through which citizens are called to answer for their alleged wrongs.