2012 Volume 61 Pages 117-150,en8
The aim of this paper is to reconsider whether Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, presented the theory against double punishment in a conflict between him and Henry II, the king of England. This quarrel is called the Becket dispute, which is often referred to in the historical context of the double jeopardy.
According to the third clause of the Constitutions of Clarendon of 1164, Henry II proposed that a clerk accused of some serious crime should be delivered to the royal court, and that the clerk who was deposed after condemnation in the church court should be punished in the royal court. To this proposal, it is said, Becket opposed from the following point of view. Firstly, any clerk should not be judged before a secular judge. Secondly, 'God does not judge twice in the same matter.' A common view basing upon studies on the Becket dispute so far explains that Becket himself certainly objected that the third clause is contrary to the benefit of clergy and the theory against double punishment. However, what they relied on in their studies is not anything written by Becket himself but the Lives of Thomas Becket or a treatise written for him after his death.
Close analysis of his letters shows that he did not present the theory against double punishment, but he seems to have asserted that any clerk in any case should not be judged before a secular judge for the clerical immunity from secular jurisdiction. Moreover, the Bolognese and the Anglo-Norman canonists, the king of England and prelates in England accepted the double punishment during the Becket dispute. Therefore, it should be noted that the theory against double punishment appears only in the Lives of Thomas Becket and the treatise after his death.
