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Letters

October 2009

A case of murder?: a reply

by Pat Rogers

Pat Rogers replies:

Aldan Markson is right of course that the impeachment of Strafford failed in the Lords, but to describe a parliamentary bill of
attainder as "murder" is an extreme use of words, unless the termis taken to mean "judicial" (i.e. legal but morally unwarranted) killing. Normally, a murder is defined as an unlawful killing, but parliament had the right to pass a bill of attainder, with the royal assent, whether or not this was the proper course to take. As it happens, I agree with Markson that Strafford was treated inan extremely cruel and unjust way, but it's not clear that we can call such things murder as ordinarily understood.

Pat Rogers is the author of Johnson (Past Masters), The Samuel Johnson Encylopedia, and the entry for Johnson in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.


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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 28 October 2009, on page 82

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