Jury trial
A jury trial, or trial by jury, is a legal proceeding in which a jury makes a decision or findings of fact. It is distinguished from a bench trial in which a judge or panel of judges makes all decisions.
This article is about the form of trial. For the jury itself, see Petit jury.
Jury trials are increasingly used in a significant share of serious criminal cases in many but not all common law judicial systems. Juries or lay judges have also been incorporated into the legal systems of many civil law countries for criminal cases, perhaps most notably in the United States.
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[edit]
Greece[edit]
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.[1] 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[edit]
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: