King Charls His Case: The Intended Prosecution of Charles I

Charles I was put to death without having pleaded to the charges preferred against him during his trial. This article examines the case that his prosecutor later said he would have opened, had the king entered a plea. John Cook's case was predictably forthright in its denunciation of the accused. On the other hand, it has some highly significant omissions; some of it was legally and factually hopeless, and much of the rest invited fairly obvious responses; whilst its exposition was much more contentious than one might expect from a case for the prosecution of a man whose guilt had already been pronounced ‘notorious’. Rather than simply setting out a wholly unsatisfactory indictment of the king's alleged ‘guilt’, as a mere prelude to the shedding of his blood, Cook's true aim appears to have been to goad the king into making, before the eyes of the watching world, a case in his own defence sufficient to enable the king's judges, having heard what he might have to say, and subject to ‘the merit of the Cause’, to hand down some sentence other than death - all as the Act erecting the high court of justice authorized them to do.     

Patent Cases in the Court of Chancery, 1714–58

The purpose of this article is two-fold. First, it discusses recent improvements in the cataloguing of Chancery bills and pleadings entered between 1714 and 1758, held in the C 11 series at the National Archives. This has made it much easier to locate cases by subject, and a methodology for doing this is described. Secondly, the article outlines the results of work carried out in C 11 on cases relating to patents for invention. Although there has been significant research into how other forms of intellectual property right were adjudicated in the Court of Chancery, notably copyright, patent law for this period remains obscure. The article shows that Chancery (along with the common law courts) retained the principal jurisdiction in patent law, rather than the Privy Council as was once thought.     

Forensic Identification of Blood in the Presence of Contaminations Using Raman Microspectroscopy Coupled with Advanced Statistics: Effect of Sand,Dust, and Soil

Body fluid traces recovered at crime scenes are among the most common and important types of forensic evidence. However, the ability to characterize a biological stain at a crime scene nondestructively has not yet been demonstrated. Here, we expand the Raman spectroscopic approach for the identification of dry traces of pure body fluids to address the problem of heterogeneous contamination, which can impair the performance of conventional methods. The concept of multidimensional Raman signatures was utilized for the identification of blood in dry traces contaminated with sand, dust, and soil. Multiple Raman spectra were acquired from the samples via automatic scanning, and the contribution of blood was evaluated through the fitting quality using spectroscopic signature components. The spatial mapping technique allowed for detection of “hot spots” dominated by blood contribution. The proposed method has great potential for blood identification in highly contaminated samples.