Star Chamber

In the text by Hart, The Rule of Law (1603-1660) the author recounts the hated Star Chamber, a Court that the rulers used to avoid any of the rights of the subjects, not yet citizens, in England. As Hart notes:

In fact, the conciliar origins of these courts (as compared to those created by statute or confirmed by ancient custom or common law tradition) always made them suspect. That was certainly true of the court of Star Chamber, the other great central institution spawned by the Council’s general supervisory jurisdiction. Star Chamber had evolved in much the same fashion as Chancery, and to similar purpose - to relieve the Council of the need to deal with private complaints. What distinguished the Council’s work in Star Chamber (and later its jurisdiction as a formally constituted court) were allegations of criminal misconduct or violence. 

The Council understandably had always taken special interest in all breaches of ‘the King’s Peace’ and, under the leadership of Tudor chancellors, especially Thomas Wolsey, consciously expanded its purview to include a wide range of criminal offenses. These included allegations of public disorder - riot, rout, unlawful assembly - and, more particularly, crimes which compromised the integrity of the judicial system - forgery, perjury, maintenance, subornation of witnesses, bribery and so on. As Star Chamber’s jurisdiction was consciously expanded over the course of the sixteenth century, the Crown and its legal officers increasingly began to make use of the court, pursuing and prosecuting offenders on their own  nitiative, often on the basis of leads provided by government informers. 

As in the case of Chancery, the collective authority of Star Chamber’s officers, and the compelling demands of maintaining good order, argued in favor of allowing the court to exercise wide discretionary powers. Star Chamber was not required to observe any of the rules which governed common law criminal proceedings. Prosecutions could be initiated on the basis of simple information (rather than as a consequence of a formal grand jury indictment) and could be concluded on the basis of evidence taken by the court itself (without the need to resort to jury trial). Nor was the court constrained in terms of penalties. Apart from capital punishment - which the constitution insisted had to proceed from a common law trial by a jury of one’s peers - Star Chamber was free to inflict whatever punishments - corporal or financial - it deemed necessary or appropriate. In fact, Star Chamber offered advantages to all parties. 

Litigants were attracted, as they were to Chancery, by the relative ease and alacrity of the court’s process, and by the potentially intimidating authority of the court’s decree - essentially, given the near-duplication of personnel, a declaration, in all but name, of the King’s Council. Its decisions, in short, were beyond challenge or appeal. For that reason, Crown prosecutions in Star Chamber also served as a very powerful weapon of intimidation and deterrence, and inevitably the court became a convenient tribunal through which the Crown could pursue and punish those who stood out against its policies (not least because, in doing so, it could bypass the need for potentially uncooperative juries)

In fact, Stalin found this means to justice also quite useful.