"The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial" by James Q. Whitman will be released on 31 January 2008, and is for sale on Amazon.
No doubt some insight can found in Whitman's paper by the same name that was published in Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship Series Year 2005 - it can be found via Google Scholar.
In the paper Whitman writes about the concept of reasonable doubt in criminal proceedings originating from the idea of "protecting the judges themselves" in order for them to "escape personal moral responsibility for entering judgment, and so escape the threat of “building themselves a mansion in Hell.”", instead of protecting the accused from wrongful convictions [p. 48].
"As Nörr showed, it is because for them, the problem was not a problem of proof at all, but a problem of conscience. Medieval jurists were worried about protecting the soul of the judge—of a judge who, as Peter the Chanter had worried, might too easily “make himself into a murderer.” For such a judge, it was of course criminal matters that presented the gravest threat; for it was criminal matters that involved blood. " [p. 49]
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