In English law, the benefit of clergy (Law Latin Privilegium clericale) was originally a provision by which clergymen could claim that they were outside the jurisdiction of the secular courts and be tried instead in an ecclesiastical court under canon law. Eventually, the course of history transformed it into a mechanism by which first-time offenders could receive a more lenient sentence for some lesser crimes (the so-called "clergyable" ones).
Read more about Benefit Of Clergy: Origin, The Miserere, Tudor-era Reforms, Later Development
Famous quotes containing the words benefit of, benefit and/or clergy:
“In a country where offices are created solely for the benefit of the people no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“When a Benefit is wrongly conferred, the author of the Benefit may often be said to injure.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“To impose celibacy on such a large body as the clergy of the Catholic Church is not to forbid it to have wives but to order it to be content with the wives of others.”
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)