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The history of the jury system and..?

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what is the history of the just system and the important civic duty of the jury service /

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  1. HISTORY OF THE JURY                                      

    By the time the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights were drafted and ratified, the institution of trial by jury was almost universally revered, so revered that its history had been traced back to Magna Carta. The jury began in the form of a grand or presentment jury with the role of inquest and was started by Frankish conquerors to discover the King's rights. Henry II regularized this type of proceeding to establish royal control over the machinery of justice, first in civil trials and then in criminal trials. Trial by petit jury was not employed at least until the reign of Henry III, in which the jury was first essentially a body of witnesses, called for their knowledge of the case; not until the reign of Henry VI did it become the trier of evidence. It was during the Seventeenth Century that the jury emerged as a safeguard for the criminally accused. Thus, in the Eighteenth Century, Blackstone could commemorate the institution as part of a ''strong and two-fold barrier . . . between the liberties of the people and the prerogative of the crown'' because ''the truth of every accusation . . . . [must] be confirmed by the unanimous suffrage of twelve of his equals and neighbors indifferently chosen and superior to all suspicion.'' The right was guaranteed in the constitutions of the original 13 States, was guaranteed in the body of the Constitution and in the Sixth Amendment, and the constitution of every State entering the Union thereafter in one form or another protected the right to jury trial in criminal cases. ''Those who emigrated to this country from England brought with them this great privilege 'as their birthright and inheritance, as a part of that admirable common law which had fenced around and interposed barriers on every side against the approaches of arbitrary power.'''


  2. HISTORY OF THE JURY                                      

    By the time the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights were drafted and ratified, the institution of trial by jury was almost universally revered, so revered that its history had been traced back to Magna Carta. The jury began in the form of a grand or presentment jury with the role of inquest and was started by Frankish conquerors to discover the King's rights. Henry II regularized this type of proceeding to establish royal control over the machinery of justice, first in civil trials and then in criminal trials. Trial by petit jury was not employed at least until the reign of Henry III, in which the jury was first essentially a body of witnesses, called for their knowledge of the case; not until the reign of Henry VI did it become the trier of evidence. It was during the Seventeenth Century that the jury emerged as a safeguard for the criminally accused. Thus, in the Eighteenth Century, Blackstone could commemorate the institution as part of a ''strong and two-fold barrier . . . between the liberties of the people and the prerogative of the crown'' because ''the truth of every accusation . . . . [must] be confirmed by the unanimous suffrage of twelve of his equals and neighbors indifferently chosen and superior to all suspicion.'' The right was guaranteed in the constitutions of the original 13 States, was guaranteed in the body of the Constitution and in the Sixth Amendment, and the constitution of every State entering the Union thereafter in one form or another protected the right to jury trial in criminal cases. ''Those who emigrated to this country from England brought with them this great privilege 'as their birthright and inheritance, as a part of that admirable common law which had fenced around and interposed barriers on every side against the approaches of arbitrary power.'''

    ''The guarantees of jury trial in the Federal and State Constitutions reflect a profound judgment about the way in which law should be enforced and justice administered. A right to jury trial is granted to criminal defendants in order to prevent oppression by the Government. Those who wrote our constitutions knew from history and experience that it was necessary to protect against unfounded criminal charges brought to eliminate enemies and against judges too responsive to the voice of higher authority. The framers of the constitutions strove to create an independent judiciary but insisted upon further protection against arbitrary action. Providing an accused with the right to be tried by a jury of his peers gave him an inestimable safeguard against the corrupt overzealous prosecutor and against the compliant, biased, or eccentric judge. . . . [T]he jury trial provisions . . . reflect a fundamental decision about the exercise of official power--a reluctance to entrust plenary powers over the life and liberty of the citizen to one judge or to a group of judges. Fear of unchecked power . . . found expression in the criminal law in this insistence upon community participation in the determination of guilt or innocence.''

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    History of jury trials

    If one considers the jury trial as one of lay judges and do not limit the number to the twelve of Anglo-Saxon common law, it can be said that the jury can be found as far back as ancient Greece and Rome. The judicial procedure in Athens that Aristotle recorded in The Athenian Constitution, was the following: to be a juror or dikaste, one needed to be over thirty, not owe anything to the state and not be a slave. The dikaste, the individuals who formed part of the Athenian jury, were chosen by lot by the Archons of their tribe, each of the Archons of the nine tribes contributing to the formation of the dikastai. There existed a mechanism through which it was assured that no one could elect dikaste for their own trial. For normal cases, the courts were made up of dikastai of 500 citizens. For capital cases, those which involved death, the loss of liberty, exile, the loss of civil rights, or the seizure of property, the trial was before a jury of 1,000 to 1,500 dikastai. It isn’t hard to see why the unanimity rule would be unrealistic in this kind of trial, as well as why it should be unstable as a form of government.

    From the beginnings 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, the Roman judges being civilian, lay and not professional. Capital trials were held in front of juries composed of hundreds or thousands of people in the commitias or centuries, the same as in Greek trials. There exists a connection between England and Rome that goes back to the time of Julius Caesar, when he conquered the southern part of the British isle. How deep was the imprint left by the Roman institutions on the Celts that were romanized is difficult to determine. With the fall of the Roman empire and the following barbarization of the region, historians doubt that Roman customs and laws survived. The arrival of Roman institutions to England is more widely attributed to William the Conqueror and the Normans during times of greater interest in Roman law.

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