Juries

• Author: Daniel Brannen, Richard Hanes, Elizabeth Shaw
• Pages: 375-379

Contenidos

• History of the Jury.
• The Right to Jury Trials in the United States.
• Jury Selection.
• Jury Verdicts.
• Suggestions for further reading.

Page 375

A jury is a group of ordinary citizens that hears and decides a legal case. The jury's decision is called a verdict. Juries base their verdicts on testimony from witnesses and other evidence. A jury's verdict represents a community's opinion about who should win a legal case. Jurors, then, play an important role in the American system of justice.

History of the Jury

Historians have traced the jury system back to Athens, Greece, around 400 BC. Aristotle, a Greek philosopher, recorded that juries decided cases based on their understanding of general justice. The ancient Roman Empire, however, did not use juries. A professional court system decided cases without ordinary citizens. The Dark Ages that followed the fall of the Roman Empire had little law and no use for juries.

Great Britain did not use a jury system until the twelfth century AD. Prior to then, the Catholic Church's courts controlled the legal system. The ordeal was a popular way of deciding criminal cases. If the accused could survive physical torture, the court declared him innocent.

Page 376

Compurgation was a method of resolving civil cases, those between individual citizens. The person who brought the most friends to support his side of the case won.

In the twelfth century AD, King Henry II gave Great Britain its first jury system for deciding disputes over land. Later, his son King John was a ruthless monarch who regularly seized the land and families of landowners who could not pay their debts on time. In 1215, a group of landowners confronted King John at knifepoint and forced him to sign the Magna Carta. That historic document gave British citizens the right to have a jury trial before being "imprisoned or seized or exiled or in any way destroyed."

The Right to Jury Trials in the United States

The English jury system migrated to the American colonies. Great Britain, however, did not allow jury trials in all cases in the colonies. Some cases were bench trials, which means a judge decided them from his bench. Because colonial judges depended on the British monarch for their jobs and the amount of their salaries, they often were unfair to the colonists. When Thomas Jefferson and the Second Continental Congress wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, they listed unfair judges and the lack of jury...