Juries are often considered necessary due to ‘tradition’, a fundamental key to democracy and allows people to be judged by their peers, but does that mean that juries are ‘better’ or needed?
Should the way you receive legal judgement be a weighing of odds? Juries are made up on 12 members, you only need two of them to think otherwise in order to bring around a hung jury.
Juries ARE traditional within the UK legal system, able to be traced all the way back to Magna Carta. They are selected at random, typically having only minimal legal knowledge, and so this can bring about a lot of debate; should those without legal knowledge give a legal judgement? Are their decisions based on law or based on their moral beliefs? Due to the privacy extended to juries we can’t see their deliberations, and so we may never know how they come to their conclusions or their reasoning; the jury verdict is sacrosanct.
But why do we view juries to be so important?
- Acting as a system of checks and balances,
- Prevention of tyranny,
- Represent the voice of the people,
- Allows for an ‘open’ system of justice,
- Operates as a balance against state interference,
- Supposed ‘impartiality’
But are these all valid advantages?
The purpose of a jury is to act as a representation of the public; however, this is not likely. First, the manner in randomly selecting jury members does not always equate to a wide selection of individuals offering difference backgrounds, an example of this is the American case of Rodney Reed, an African American man that had an all-white jury. It can be argued that just because of racial differences doesn’t mean that will impact the decision, however racial biases have been well documented within the legal system, with the NAACP stating that African Americans are incarcerated 5 times more than the rate of white individuals. Nobody is immune to the effects of biases, we all have thoughts and opinions, experiences and beliefs that colour our opinions within life.
Often juries have been referred to as ‘the victims of skilful lawyers’, manipulation is a skill that is often used when formulating an argument, and so it is only logical that lawyers tend to develop a rather talented way in offering an argument to the jury to elicit the reaction they desire. Sometimes things that can be considered irrelevant to the facts of a case can have an impact on how the jury comes to a conclusion, such as the personality demonstrated by the prosecution and defence, if they appear more likeable are a jury going to sway in their favour? If a judgement was made by a judge, they have a duty to focus solely on the facts and legal reasoning, but with no minimum level of education required of a jury, are they always able to pick out legal reasoning and relevant information?
Additional disadvantages are;
- Media influence,
- Jury vetting is against principle of random selection,
- Potential boredom,
- Difficulty to follow complicated cases,
Judges, while having a legal background and the ability to pick out legal reasoning, are not infallible, I shall briefly highlight these.
- We all fall prey to biases.
- Concern that judges can be TOO removed from the situation, sometimes crimes can occur out of the circumstances surrounding the individual, such as desperation.
- A judge being the sole deciding factor within a case, does not allow for the differing of opinions and perspectives.
- Are we giving judges too much power?
What is your opinion on jury trials?
Photo by Bill Oxford on Unsplash
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