Monty Python, The Holy Grail, and the Idea of Due Process

The idea of due process can be a difficult legal concept for a lot of non-lawyers.  But you can get the basic idea from Monty Python’s classic movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  You just need to watch a single scene, the “she’s a witch!” scene, which is here:

You probably remember the scene, at least if you’re of a certain age.  To recap: The mob has found a witch, and they’re very excited to burn her.  They come to Bedevere and ask for his permission to do it.  Bedevere pauses and asks,  “How do you know she’s a witch?”   The crowd can’t come up with a good reason.  Bedevere then insists that there are ways of telling if she’s a witch, and he leads the mob to a scientific test of that proposition.

The method Bedevere devises is absurd.  Witches and wood both burn, the medieval logic goes, so witches must be made of wood. And wood and ducks both float, so if she weighs the same as a duck, she must be a witch! They get a big scale and weigh her and a duck; the scale being even proves she’s a witch.  It’s all exceedingly silly, of course.  But it impresses a watching King Arthur, who knights Bedevere and invites him to join the Round Table.

At one level, the scene is a hilarious spoof of the bizarre ways they tried to identify who was a witch in medieval England. Those methods weren’t all that different from weighing the accused against a duck. In particular, the scene echoes the medieval practice of swimming a witch, where they would submerge a suspected witch under water to see if they sunk to the bottom or floated. (Innocent people would sink to the bottom, but witches would float above the water, they thought.)

But more importantly, the scene is also about due process.  The mob is positive the woman is a witch. Bedevere asks the key question, but how do you know she is one?  The crowd first invokes the fake nose and the hat they put on her to make her look like a witch. Bedevere is unimpressed.  He then introduces the basic idea of due process: Before taking the action of burning the woman as a witch, there should be a process for developing and evaluating evidence that she is one.

The absurdity of the process Bedevere proposes makes the same point.  In the unenlightened medieval times, the script writers are telling us, they didn’t understand how to test what is true.  The process Bedevere came up with was silly. It had no ability to help a fact finder discover if she was a witch or not.  And it seems to have been fixed, too, with the woman clearly not weighing the same as a duck but the two coming out the same weight.  The accused even breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the camera about it.  She sarcastically comments: “It’s a fair cop,” British slang for “that’s a fair process; yeah, you got me.”  Of course, it was not a fair process at all. It was a process, but not a fair one.

The lawyerly idea of due process, it seems to me, is all about Bedevere stopping the crowd and asking how they know she’s a witch.  And then it’s a matter of figuring out what procedures should be in place to tell if the crowd’s belief is true. (Of course, they’re stacking the deck because we know today that witches don’t exist in the first place. But it’s only a model, er, a movie.)

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