The Tyrannicide Brief
by Geoffrey Robertson
Buy on AmazonCharles I waged civil wars that cost one in ten Englishmen their lives. But in 1649 Parliament was hard put to find a lawyer with the skill and daring to prosecute a king who claimed to be above the law. In the end, they chose the radical lawyer John Cooke, whose Puritan conscience, political vision, and love of civil liberties gave him the courage to bring the king to trial. As a result, Charles I was beheaded, but eleven years later Cooke himself was arrested, tried, and executed at the hands of Charles II.…
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"This is about a radical lawyer who took a case nobody wanted. John Cook prosecuted King Charles I on the basis that a ruler cannot kill his own people and then claim executive privilege. He won and in 1649 the death warrant was signed and the King was beheaded outside St James’s Palace. The room where the King spent his last night is still there – just on Pall Mall. Cook established, as Robertson argues it, that rulers are not above their own people. Of course, it ends badly for Cook. Charles II was restored and Cook was hunted down, hung, drawn and quartered. An unbelievably horrible way to go and sad because he hadn’t wanted Charles I to be executed. But there are seeds of this case in current international law and in the arrests of people like Pinochet and Saddam Hussein."
Trial By Jury · fivebooks.com