[20]
Sometimes
indeed the whole case may rest on such considerations. For example, if a father has made an express
declaration that he has disinherited his son because
lie was in love with a woman of the town, will not
the whole question turn on the point whether it was
the father's duty to pardon such an offence and
whether it is the duty of the centumviral court
to overlook it? Nay, even in penal prosecutions
governed by strict forms of law we raise two separate
questions: first whether the penalty has been incurred,
and secondly whether, if so, it ought to be inflicted.
Still the view of the authorities to whom I have
referred that an accused person cannot be saved
from the clutches of the law by this method of
defence is perfectly correct.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.