Seems a lot like civil asset forfeiture but with actually more due process protection.
[Fast food restaurant/soda fountain joke.]
Ordinarily I associate railroads with pushing bad legislation but I have to side with them on this.
I know the post is about inanimate objects, but it reminds me of something read about (I think?) colonial New England. Bestiality was punishable by death—not only for the human, but also for the animal.
That struck me as an especially terrible policy for the poor, traumatized sheep.
The medieval deathbot is relevant here, though it lists fewer deodands than I remember.
A lot of details on deodands here. Not just inanimate objects:
Deodands could be applied to almost anything,and
including animals -- rams, bulls, a tiger, an elephant
and an antelope were all subject to deodands in the
1820s and 1830s. In 1825 a nominal 1s was levied on
an elephant which caused a death at Exeter Exchange
in London and in 1841 a one shilling deodand was
levied on a large cheese which fell off a man's head
and killed a four year old child in Haymarket, London.
Whatever the arguments about the use of deodandAlso led me to the concept of "furious driving" which seems to still be on the books in most of GB today.
to compensate people caught up in the machinery of
the Industrial Revolution, it was in fact road transport
that most often had to pay up -- and the horse was
the most common object on which deodand was
levied.
Why would that rule have existed by the time the railroads showed up?* I know vague rumor-level stuff about purifying areas contaminated by crimes and stuff a long time ago (ancient Greece and such) but I would have thought that had mostly disappeared by the time England was. Is it some kind of "and also we're taking your sword away from you before you do anything else dangerous with it" rule from back when legal remedies were mostly either fines or death?
Admittedly I'm also not entirely sure what purpose civil asset forfeiture laws have aside from how they're blatantly used these days as a combination of "we can't actually punish you because we can't prove you did anything wrong but we can take this stuff we claim you did it with which is close" and "I want that give it to me".
*Or is it just that common law systems invariably have bizarre or very outdated things in them because it's easier to just ignore something than go back and figure out how to change rules without invalidating all sorts of other things?
Forgot the link.
Anyway, good stuff for Saturday morning time-wasting.
...the jury found manslaughter against
its driver, levied a deodand of £20 and the proprietor
was convicted of furious driving.
Wait is furious driving a crime over there? Why isn't it one here? That would be an amazing law.
Or is it just that common law systems invariably have bizarre or very outdated things in them because it's easier to just ignore something than go back and figure out how to change rules without invalidating all sorts of other things?
Yes. Until the establishment of the Law Commission 50 years ago, there were all sorts of ridiculous left over laws in England that everybody agreed to ignore. Doubtless the same in the older colonies.
You don't really have to go back very far around here to end up with all sorts of bizarro laws, mainly I think because of the way federalism allows even fairly small areas to make their own laws. So you get laws which look general banning strange things but which were clearly intended to make farmer Jones stop doing something that annoyed his neighbors, or more general ones intended to make one or two of the smaller areas stop doing something obnoxious.
Furious driving makes me think of Mr. Furious from mystery men. He was awesome but not as awesome as The Shoveler.
The law of Henry VIII requiring people to practice archery on a regular basis was ambiguously repealed in 1845 and unambiguously in 1960. So that's a load of everybody's mind. (I don't know whether it's still in force in America. Probably.)
In 1819 (?) a man exercised his right to trial by combat in the UK.
(Arguably this kind of old law went through a sort of revival in the first half of the 19th century as sort of general invention of tradition.)
I know a fair amount about this subject. The deodand wasn't a crazy idea in a world of questionable liquidity; much like civil forfeiture (in theory) today, it provides a kind of rough-justice easily collectible measure of civil penty from people from whom such a penalty would either be difficult to collect from at all or require extensive and extended proceedings to collect from. Plus the atavistic pleasure of hurting the object that fucked with you, of course.
Isn't the deodand a big part of the origin of the coroner as an investigator of deaths? (I used to know something about this but then I forgot.)
Do you even have coroners in the States?
Yes, but it's more of a strictly medical thing than it is in fictional British places.
Why would that rule have existed by the time the railroads showed up?*
Beats me but apparently it totally did.
12. Offences Against the Person Act, 1865, para. 35.
"Drivers of carriages injuring persons by furious driving.
"Whosoever, having the charge of any carriage or vehicle, shall by wanton or furious driving or racing, or other wilful misconduct, or by wilful neglect, do or cause to be done any bodily harm to any person whatsoever, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and being convicted thereof shall be liable, at the discretion of the court, to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, . . ."
In the KJV of the Bible, 2 Kings 9:20 reads "And the watchman told, saying, He came even unto them, and cometh not again: and the driving is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi; for he driveth furiously."
Driving like Jehu was a semi-proverbial description of dangerous driving to my father's and earlier generations, and I'd guess this was what the legislators had in mind.
Oh, so that's where the band name comes from!
The deodand wasn't a crazy idea in a world of questionable liquidity; much like civil forfeiture (in theory) today, it provides a kind of rough-justice easily collectible measure of civil penty from people from whom such a penalty would either be difficult to collect from at all or require extensive and extended proceedings to collect from.
Was that then a component of "equity" that as I understand was present historically but became deprecated over time? As in, someone's been harmed, they need compensation, here's an asset that can legitimately be used for the purpose regardless of fault.
Do you even have coroners in the States?
There's a bit of a patchwork - some states have coroners, others have medical examiners which is a mild technocratic revamp of the role (i.e. they have to be doctors and I think are usually appointed not elected). In my county the office is elective but it's been merged with that of sheriff, so you get "Sheriff/Coroner" on the ballot and in practice it's one of the sheriff's bureaus.
But I think the position has the same functions across US and UK; the differences are just in qualifications and entry process.
21 -- it was a legal, not equitable, remedy. Which meant maiy that it could be issued by different courts
Do you even have coroners in the States?
Yes, but it's more of a strictly medical thing than it is in fictional British places.
Kinda sorta. I'd disagree that the ME system is a technocratic revamp; the two systems originated and spread separately, and they're roughly 50-50 in representation across the country, but it's complicated. Some states are coroner-only, with office held by elected officials with no medical training required; they hold inquests and outsource autopsies to pathologists. Others have MEs (who are appointed MDs, usually forensic pathologists) at the state and county level, while others have a state ME and county coroners. But yes, the basic job is death investigation.
23.2: Right. And sometimes there have been big, raucus political demonstrations geared towards switching from one system to the other, as depicted famously in the song lyrics:
Down on the coroner / Rowdy in the streets
I suppose I could use an internet search engine to find links to information regarding this topic, but I thought it was possible to be just a non-MD pathologist or something and be ME? I thought that's what a former cow orker's wife did. I suppose I could ask him too, using a popular social networking internet site's short, instantaneous messaging system.
Rowdy in the streets, stiff under a sheet.
I swear to God, Stanley, your death certificate is going to include the phrase "blunt force trauma to the head".
So, deodands originally went to the church/state. But at some point did they geenrally start going to the victim's family. Not clear from the couple of things I read. For instance:
At the third reading (of the second Bill) in August
1846, Lord Somerset raised the question of the
Queen's opinions as she earned over £800 a year
from deodand awards but the government reported
she had signalled her acceptance of abolition.
I learned about deodands from Patrick O'Brian, where he also describes actual English legal rites like this:
Here I am,
Riding on a black ram,
Like a whore as I am;
And for my crinkum-crankum,
Have lost my binkum-bankum;
And for my tail's game
Am brought to this worldly shame.
Therefore good Mr Steward let me have my lands again.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-cri3.htm