"Civilly Dead" Convicts Win Lawsuit

From In For The Long Haul: First Fleet Voyage & Colonial Australia: The Convicts' Perspective, by Annegret Hall (ESH Publication, 2018), Kindle pp. 186-187:

In July, the convicts Henry and Susannah Kable launched the first civil action in the settlement. They sued the Master of the Alexander, Duncan Sinclair, for the loss of personal items in his charge during the voyage. These articles had been purchased in England from donations sent to them following the newspaper articles about baby Henry not being allowed to board the Dunkirk, and Sinclair had held these during the First Fleet voyage. When Henry and Susannah disembarked in Sydney Cove, most of these personal items had disappeared. The court ruled that the Kables be compensated £15.13

The importance of this trial is that Judge Advocate Collins’ ruling set the legal precedent of ignoring English common law which maintained that felons were ‘civilly dead’ if they had ever been sentenced to death. A ‘civilly dead’ person was not allowed to hold property, give evidence, make contracts or sue in court. Although [Governor] Arthur Phillip and David Collins were well aware of the English law, they had no official sentence documents to check Kable’s convict status. A large number of the convicts in the colony had been given death sentences that were later commuted to transportation, and, had the English legal interpretation been applied, they would be barred from the commercial and legal affairs of the colony. Collins’ decision to proceed with the case, and to find in favour of the Kables, cleared many legal obstacles for convicts to participate in the commercial development of New South Wales.