People v. Harrington

By the Court, Sprague, J.: The defendants were indicted, tried, and convicted of the crime of robbery, and appeal from the judgment of the Court rendered against them upon the verdict. The only point now urged by the defendants against the validity of the judgment is presented by the following bill of exceptions:

“ On the 22d day of June, 1871, a jury was called, impaneled, and sworn in said cause to try said cause—the defendants at the time being in Court and in irons. The counsel for defendants asked that the irons be removed from the limbs of defendants while they were being tried. The Court refused to order the same to be done, and ruled and decided that said defendants should be tried while in irons—no circumstances or facts being shown to the Court wdiy a different rule should be enforced in this cause than any other— the Court being of the opinion that no rights of defendants were violated by being tried in irons without their consent, to which ruling and decision of the Court the defendants, by counsel, then and there excepted.”

Appellants insist that by the action of the Court in refusing, upon their motion, to direct the manacles which were upon their limbs to ’be removed while they were in Court upon trial, and compelling them to be tried while their limbs were shackled with irons, without any apparent or pretended [167]necessity therefor, they were deprived of a substantial legal right, and that the judgment, for that reason, should be reversed. In answer, the Attorney General claims that this action of the Court is no part of the trial of the case, and hence cannot be reviewed on appeal.

I think there can be no question but that any action of the Court during the progress of a trial for felony which deprives the defendant of a substantial legal right in the premises, or to any extent, to his prejudice, withholds or abridges a substantial legal or constitutional privilege of a defendant, and by him claimed on the trial, is a proper subject matter of review by this Court on appeal. (People v. Keenan, 13 Cal. 584.) The question, then, is whether a prisoner placed upon his trial for a felony, can, as a legal or constitutional right, demand that during his trial, while before the Court and jury, his limbs should not he manacled, or that he should not be in vinculis during his trial, there being no pretense of necessity for such restraint to secure his continued- presence in Court.

It has ever been the rule at common law that a prisoner brought into the presence of a Court for trial, upon his plea of not guilty to an indictment for any offense, was entitled to appear free of all manner of shackles or bonds; and prior to 1722, when a prisoner was arraigned, or appeared at the bar of a Court to plead, he was presented without manacles or bonds, unless there was evident danger of his escape. (2 Hale’s Pleas of the Crown, 219; 4 Black. Com. 322; Layer’s Case, 6 State Trials, 4th edition, by Hargrave, 230, 231, 244, 245; Waite’s Case, 1 Leach’s Cases in Crown Law, 36.)