Scotland's historic not-proven court verdict is to be scrapped after MSPs have voted on a package of reforms in our parliament at Holyrood. The verdict has been one of three possible verdicts in Scottish legal cases since the 17th century, with the other two being guilty or not-guilty. In a technical sense not-proven also meant "not guilty", but had a subtle difference attached - not-proven was taken to mean that although there was a belief that a suspect was responsible, there was no evidence to confirm it, and thus the same net result emerged, with the person tried walking away without a conviction as a free individual. The removal of not proven as a verdict removes one of the major historic differences between Scots and English law (although plenty of others remain!).
In the Mount Stewart Murder of 1866, in which my three times great grandmother Janet Rogers (Henderson) was murdered at her brother's farm in Forgandenny, Perthshire, a suspect was tried a year later and the case against him found to be not-proven, although the stigma of the case stayed with him after the result. (You can read more about the case in my book, The Mount Stewart Murder, available from History Press at https://thehistorypress.co.uk/publication/the-mount-stewart-murder/).
For more on the planned abolition of the verdict visit https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy8rndyyp7vo.
Chris
Order Researching Ancestral Crisis in Ireland in the UK at https://bit.ly/4jJWSEh. Also available - Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors, Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records, Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. For purchase in tthe USA visit https://www.penandswordbooks.com. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page.
