By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
”Write that down,” the King said to the jury, and the jury eagerly wrote down all three dates on their slates, and then added them up, and reduced the answer to shillings and pence.”
~Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Few institutions of the English speaking peoples are held in the same esteem as juries in criminal cases. A full three quarters of those polled in the U.S. would want their case decided by a jury rather than a judge. Three in five Australians believe their jury system is working well. In the UK, juries enjoy support from 72% of the population and the same percentage rate the right to trial by jury as one of the most important in society. Compare that to the U.S. Congress’ approval rating of 15% or the President’s rating of 43% and you can see that in America we love juries.
And why shouldn’t we? After all, it was Jefferson who reminded none other than that firebrand of the Revolution, Thomas Payne, in 1789, that “trial by jury [is] the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.” Jefferson words surely were on the mind of Justice Byron “Whizzer” White when he wrote, “The purpose of a jury is to guard against the exercise of arbitrary power — to make available the commonsense judgment of the community as a hedge against the overzealous or mistaken prosecutor and in preference to the professional or perhaps overconditioned or biased response of a judge.”
But do modern juries live up to the billing? Are they the bulwarks of democracy seeking only truth or sad victims of a process designed to produce groupthink results due to systemic flaws? Are they staunch individuals committed to their position and determined to fight to the last man to prove it, or are they susceptible to influences both in and out of the deliberation room which have little or nothing to do with evidence and logic. In essence, are they seekers of truth or merely consensus?
Continue reading “American Juries: Seekers of Truth or Mere Consensus? Part I” →
Florida starting linebacker Antonio Morrison has been suspended from the team after he was arrested for barking at a police dog. That’s right, the 19-year-old was arrested for walking up to a police dog and barking at him. Gainesville police then added a second, and equally dubious charge, of resisting arrest without violence. Morrison came up with a novel defense: he insisted that the dog barked at him first.
