How All-Female 'Juries of Matrons' Shaped Legal History
Source: Smithsonian
An 18th-century illustration of a jury of matrons © The Trustees of the British Museum via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 For more than 700 years, women in England could avoid the death penalty just by virtue of being pregnant. A pregnant woman sentenced to death would receive a stay of execution until the baby was born. This tactic was called “pleading the belly” and often resulted in the death sentence…
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