CO129-534-9 Law of Piracy- case of Rex v. Chung Tam Kwong 1-4-1931 - 20-4-1932 — Page 91

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the jurisdiction of this court to adjudicate upon offences committed at sea depends, was in its effect parallel with the statute of Henry VIII in England, and, therefore, that as the later act authorised the trial both of misdemeanours and of felonies, the act of lienry VIII might be correctly construed in the same sense. I at that time supposed that the defini- tions of piracy contained in tertbooks relating to English criminal law represented merely the personal opinion of each writer. These opinions, with few exceptions, necessitate that the offence of piracy in respect of which an accused person became liable to conviction in the courts of the realm, must amount in its constitutent acts to a felony if those acts had occurred upon land. The standard definition is contained in East's "Fleas of the Crown" (volume II, p. 796): "The offence of piracy by common law consists in cœmitting those acts of robbery and depredation upon the high seas which if committed upon land,

would have amounted to felony there." I then regarded this definition as the ipse dixit of the scholar and I was lead to the conclusion that though

no conviction has been recorded under the statute

of Henry VIII unless for felony, yet that fact was merely accidental. The offence charged against the prisoners in these proceedings if committed

on hand would have amounted to an assault with intent

to rob. That offence in the reign of Henry VIII was,

under the common law, a misdemeanour and not a felony; and was made a felony by statute during the eighteenth century (see 17 Geo.II, 0.21).

If.

therefore