judgment of your committee, we can not too scrupulously guard, in
the interest of the liberty of the citizen, this great and almost
invaluable right. The friends of liberty under the common-law
system have stood for it and stood by it, strenuously and
assiduously, as the palladium of their liberties and the
impenetrable shield of the people from oppression. By the order
of the judge the defendant was deprived of this right, and if, in
this case of minor consequence so far as regards the punishment
inflicted, this can be done, so in the trial for murder or
treason a judge may order a verdict of the jury without allowing
them to pass upon the fact. It has been sometimes said "Can this
be done?" We are clearly of the opinion that it can not and ought
not to be done. It is sometimes said as a triumphant argument in
favor of the exercise of this power, "Has not the judge the power
to order a verdict of acquittal?" The answer to that, as a matter
of law, is "No; he can only direct the jury that upon the facts
and matter of law he believes the case can not be maintained, but
that it is for the jury to say whether they will follow that
direction;" and his remedy is to set aside that verdict, and that
power has always been exercised at common law in favor of the
prisoner, but he can not set aside the verdict of not guilty.
Sometimes, in the darker hours of English jurisprudence, the
judges fined the jury when they were not the obedient instruments
of their will but persisted in finding the defendants in state
prosecutions not guilty when the judge thought they ought to have
been found guilty; but neither Jeffreys nor Scroggs ever dared to
set aside a verdict of not guilty.

Your committee have been led by the great consequence of this
precedent more carefully and at length to give an examination to
this question to which its importance would not otherwise have
entitled it. But your committee do not find it necessary to
impute any intent of wrong to the learned judge who tried this
case; but the effect of his error was to deprive this petitioner
of a great and beneficent right, guaranteed to her as strongly as
any other by the Constitution of her country, to have the
question of her guilt passed upon by her peers, which error has
had the same effect u