The Value of Our Jury System
| Author | W. Summerfield |
| Published date | 01 April 1932 |
| Date | 01 April 1932 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032258X3200500208 |
The
Value
of
our
Jury
System
By W. SUMMERFIELD, B.C.L., LL.B.
Barrister-at-Law
WE live in an age when few, if any, established institutions
are immune from criticism designed to produce, or
actually resulting in, radical change. It is not surprising,
accordingly, that our
jury
system has not escaped contro-
versial discussion.
The
jury is one of the most venerable of all our judicial
institutions. Its antiquity is generally traced back to the days
of Alfred the Great, whose burning of the cakes may have
been due to profound absorption in its manifold intricacies.
Certainly juries were employed by the Norman Conqueror
in and about the preparation of the Domesday
Book-the
ancestor of all our taxation inquisitors.
The
reaction of the human mind to an antique institution
is either one of reverence or revulsion. We either instinctively
love the venerable and fear to lay desecrating hands upon it,
or we are prejudiced against it merely because of its age.
Aware of these innate tendencies, it is our duty to make every
effort to preserve a judicial balance in assessing the validity
or otherwise of the objections nowadays raised to the jury
system.
In
point of fact before we proceed to examine the charges
we must clearly ascertain what it is that is arraigned thus at
the bar of public opinion.
The'
jury system ' is a compre-
hensive term. There is the civil jury and the criminal jury.
We shall do well to bear in mind that they are not one and
indivisible, nor even twins; they are cousins. Justice demands
that sentence shall not be passed upon one for the sins of his
cousm.
THE
VALUE OF OUR JURY SYSTEM 239
Each of these cousins, again, is a parent.
The
former
has sired the county court jury, the common jury and the
special
jury-with
one or two youngsters who are rarely seen
or heard,
e.g,
the City of London Special jury.
The
latter
has been responsible for the introduction of coroners' juries,
grand juries and petty juries (and juries of matrons).
If
an indictment is to be preferred against the jury
system, it does not follow that all the counts in it will be
equally applicable to each of the two cousins. And if we are
to place in the dock their offspring as well, again we must
beware to keep our charges against each separate and distinct.
Nevertheless, in opening the case for the prosecution in
the cause
Rex
(Upon the information
of
the Twentieth Century)
e.
The
Jury,
it is possible and permissible to offer some
general observations of an introductory nature which shall be
applicable to all the accused.
They are, then, as we have already noted, of ancient and
royal lineage.
Their past record, nevertheless, reveals that in the main
they have espoused not the rights of their kingly begetters,
but of their subjects.
The
jury anciently stood between the king, or the central
power in the state, and the subjects who acknowledged his
sovereignty.
The
barons who wrested from King John at
Runnymede the right to trial by
'peers'
were conferring,
through Magna Carta, rights upon all their fellow-subjects
of all ranks. This development is common, indeed, to all
recorded histories of constitutions, both in the ancient and in
the modern
world-the
aristocracy in fighting for its own
privileges against the monopoly of king or tyrant has won, at
the same time, the battle for democracy. So it was that if the
barons had their own baronial ' peers ' to try their alleged
breaches of the
law-a
survival which persists down to this
day in the right of a peer of the realm to be tried for treason
or felony in the House of
Lords-the'
common' people, too,
had
their'
peers'
(i.e. equals), who could be assembled to see
that the scales of justice were not unduly or improperly
weighted on the side of the prosecuting authority against one
of their fellows.
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