What must men think, when they see wise magistrates and grave ministers of justice, with indifference and tranquility, dragging a criminal to death, and whilst a wretch trembles with agony, expecting the fatal stroke, the judge, who has condemned him, with the coldest insensibility, and perhaps with no small gratification from the exertion of his authority, quits his tribunal, to enjoy the comforts and pleasures of life? They will say, "Ah! those cruel formalities of justice are a cloak to tyranny, they are a secret language, a solemn veil, intended to conceal the sword by which we are sacrificed to the insatiable idol of despotism. Murder, which they would represent to us an horrible crime, we see practiced by them without repugnance or re... (From: Chapter 28..)
Capitalistic judges may at all times be relied upon to give a practical application of Richelieu's oft-quoted saying: "Give me four lines of a man's writing and I can hang him." It takes them less than four lines and sometimes four words to send a man to jail by weaving around his words a mass of legal jargon, which nobody understands, but which clouds the whole process of capitalistic revenge or repression with a haze of class-made legality, whose volume alone is enough to overawe the simple-minded.
What gives you [the jurors] the right to kill or lock up a man who, put on earth with the need to live, found himself obliged to take that which he lacks in order to feed himself?
I had a very good seat, and the ladies were served with refreshments between Mass and the execution. (From: Chapter 8: The History of Cunegund, Page 22..)
