A jury trial, or trial by jury, is a legal proceeding in which a jury makes findings of fact and reaches a verdict. It is distinguished from a bench trial, in which a judge or panel of judges makes all decisions.
Jury trials are used in a significant share of serious criminal cases in many common law judicial systems, but not all. Juries or lay judges have also been incorporated into the legal systems of many civil law countries for criminal cases.
The use of jury trials, which evolved within common law systems rather than civil law systems, has had a profound impact on the nature of American civil procedure and criminal procedure rules, even if a bench trial is actually contemplated in a particular case. In general, the availability of a jury trial if properly demanded has given rise to a system in which fact finding is concentrated in a single trial rather than multiple hearings, and appellate review of trial court decisions is greatly limited. Jury trials are of far less importance (or of no importance) in countries that do not have a common law system.
History
Greece Ancient Athens had a mechanism, called dikastaí, to assure that no one could select jurors for their own trial. For normal cases, the courts were made up of dikastai of up to 500 citizens. For capital cases—those that involved death, loss of liberty, exile, loss of civil rights, or seizure of property—the trial was before a jury of 1,001 to 1,501 dikastai. In such large juries, they rule by majority. Juries were appointed by lot. Jurists cast a ceramic disk with an axle in its middle: the axle was either hollow or solid. Thus the way they voted was kept secret because the jurists would hold their disk by the axle by thumb and forefinger, thus hiding whether its axle was hollow or solid. Since Periclean times, jurists were compensated for their sitting in court, with the amount of one day's wages.
The institution of trial by jury was ritually depicted by Aeschylus in The Eumenides, the third and final play of his Oresteia trilogy. In the play, the innovation is brought about by the goddess Athena, who summons twelve citizens to sit as jury. The god Apollo takes part in the trial as the advocate for the defendant Orestes and the Furies as prosecutors for the slain Clytemnestra. In the event the jury is split six to six, Athena dictates that the verdict should henceforth be for acquittal.
Roman Republic and Empire From the beginning of the republic and in the majority of civil cases towards the end of the empire, there were tribunals with the characteristics of the jury in the sense that Roman judges were civilian, lay and not professionals. Capital trials were held in front of hundreds or thousands of 'juries' in the commitias or centuries, the same as in Athenian trials. Roman law provided for the yearly selection of judices, who would be responsible for resolving disputes by acting as jurors, with a praetor performing many of the duties of a judge. High government officials and their relatives were barred from acting as judices, due to conflicts of interest. Those previously found guilty of serious crimes (felonies) were also barred as were gladiators for hire, who likely were hired to resolve disputes through trial by combat. The law was as follows:
Islamic law In classical Islamic jurisprudence, litigants in court may obtain notarized statements from between three and twelve witnesses. When the statements of all witnesses are consistent, the notaries will certify their unanimous testimony in a legal document, which may be used to support the litigant's claim. The notaries serve to free the judge from the time-consuming task of hearing the testimony of each eyewitness himself, and their documents serve to legally authenticate each oral testimony. The Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence requires two notaries to collect a minimum of twelve eyewitness statements in certain legal cases, including those involving unregistered marriages and land disputes. John Makdisi has compared this to English Common Law jury trials under King Henry II, surmising a link between the king's reforms and the legal system of the Kingdom of Sicily.
Holy Roman Empire and modern Germany A Swabian ordinance of 1562 called for the summons of jurymen (), and various methods were in use in Emmendingen, Oppenau, and Oberkirch. Hauenstein's charter of 1442 secured the right to be tried in all cases by 24 fellow equals, and in Freiburg the jury was composed of 30 citizens and councilors. The modern jury trial was first introduced in the Rhenish provinces in 1798, with a court consisting most commonly of 12 citizens ().
The system whereby citizens were tried by their peers chosen from the entire community in open court was gradually superseded by a system of professional judges in Germany, in which the process of investigation was more or less confidential and judgements were issued by judges appointed by the state. In Constance the jury trial was suppressed by decree of the Habsburg monarchy in 1786. The Frankfurt Constitution of the failed Revolutions of 1848 called for jury trials for "the more serious crimes and all political offenses", but was never implemented after the Frankfurt Parliament was dissolved by Württemberg dragoons. An 1873 draft on criminal procedure produced by the Prussian Ministry of Justice proposed to abolish the jury and replace it with the mixed system, causing a significant political debate. In the Weimar Republic the jury was abolished by the Emminger Reform of 4 January 1924.
Between 1948 and 1950 in American-occupied Germany and the Federal Republic of Germany, Bavaria returned to the jury trial as it had existed before the 1933 emergency decrees, but they were again abolished by the 1950 Unification Act () for the Federal Republic. In 1979, the United States tried the East German LOT Flight 165 hijacking suspects in the United States Court for Berlin in West Berlin, which declared the defendants had the right to a jury trial under the United States Constitution, and hence were tried by a West German jury.
England and Wales
According to George Macaulay Trevelyan in A Shortened History of England, during the Viking occupation:
The English king Æthelred the Unready set up an early legal system through the Wantage Code of Ethelred, one provision of which stated that the twelve leading thegns (minor nobles) of each wapentake (a small district) were required to swear that they would investigate crimes without a bias. These juries differed from the modern sort by being self-informing; instead of getting information through a trial, the jurors were required to investigate the case themselves.
In the 12th century, HenryII took a major step in developing the jury system. Henry II set up a system to resolve land disputes using juries. A jury of twelve free men were assigned to arbitrate in these disputes. As with the Saxon system, these men were charged with uncovering the facts of the case on their own rather than listening to arguments in court. Henry II also introduced what is now known as the "grand jury" through his Assize of Clarendon. Under the assize, a jury of free men was charged with reporting any crimes that they knew of in their hundred to a "justice in eyre", a judge who moved between hundreds on a circuit. A criminal accused by this jury was given a trial by ordeal.
The Church banned participation of clergy in trial by ordeal in 1215. Without the legitimacy of religion, trial by ordeal collapsed. The juries under the assizes began deciding guilt as well as providing accusations. The same year, trial by jury became an explicit right in one of the most influential clauses of Magna Carta. Article39 of Magna Carta read:
It is translated thus by Lysander Spooner in his Essay on the Trial by Jury:
Although it says "and or by the law of the land", this in no manner can be interpreted as if it were enough to have a positive law, made by the king, to be able to proceed legally against a citizen. The law of the land was the consuetudinary law, based on the customs and consent of John's subjects, and since they did not have Parliament in those times, this meant that neither the king nor the barons could make a law without the consent of the people.
According to some sources, in the time of EdwardIII, "by the law of the land" had been substituted "by due process of law", which in those times was a trial by twelve peers.
In 1215, Magna CartaMagna Carta of 1215 further secured defendants the right to a judgement of "reputable men of the neighbourhood"/"their equals" by stating that
During the mid-14thcentury, persons who had sat on the presenting jury (i.e., in modern parlance, the grand jury) were forbidden to sit on the trial jury for that crime. (25 Edw. 3. Stat5. c.3) (1353). Medieval juries were self-informing, in that individuals were chosen as jurors because they either knew the parties and the facts, or they had the duty to discover them. This spared the government the cost of fact-finding. Over time, English juries became less self-informing and relied more on the trial itself for information on the case. Jurors remained free to investigate cases on their own until the 17th century. Magna Carta being forgotten after a succession of benevolent reigns (or, more probably, reigns limited by the jury and the barons, and only under the rule of laws that the juries and barons found acceptable), the kings, through the royal judges, began to extend their control over the jury and the kingdom. In David Hume's History of England, he tells something of the powers that the kings had accumulated in the times after Magna Carta, the prerogatives of the crown and the sources of great power with which these monarchs counted:
The first paragraph of the act that abolished the Star Chamber repeats the clause on the right of a citizen to be judged by his peers:
In 1670 two Quakers charged with unlawful assembly, William Penn and William Mead, were found not guilty by a jury. The judge then fined the jury for contempt of court for returning a verdict contrary to their own findings of fact and removed them to prison until the fine was paid. Edward Bushel, a member of the jury, nonetheless refused to pay the fine. Bushel petitioned the Court of Common Pleas for a writ of habeas corpus. The ruling in the Bushel's Case was that a jury could not be punished simply on account of the verdict it returned.
Many British colonies, including the United States, adopted the English common law system in which trial by jury is an important part. Jury trials in criminal cases were a protected right in the original United States Constitution and the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendments of the U.S. Constitution extend the right to a jury trial for both criminal and civil matters and a grand jury for serious cases.
Role
In most common law jurisdictions, the jury is responsible for finding the facts of the case, while the judge determines the law. These "peers of the accused" are responsible for listening to a dispute, evaluating the evidence presented, deciding on the facts, and making a decision in accordance with the rules of law and their jury instructions. Typically, the jury only judges a verdict of guilty or not guilty, but the actual penalty is set by the judge.
Various verdicts Russia Following the judicial reform of Alexander II in Russia, unlike in modern jury trials, jurors decided not only whether the defendant was guilty or not guilty, but they had a third choice: "Guilty, but not to be punished", since Alexander II believed that justice without morality was wrong.
France In France and some countries organized in the same fashion, the jury and several professional judges sit together to determine guilt first. Then, if guilt is determined, they decide the appropriate penalty.
Bench trials