Trial by Jury

A Massachusetts jury found a British man guilty of murdering his wife and child this week. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole, but his lawyers quickly promised an appeal. Among their claims: that his jury was biased by intense media coverage of the crime.

Whether or not you believe that claim, it goes right to the heart of the U.S. justice system--which relies, to a large degree, on the notion of trial by a fair and impartial jury.

In fact, America's founders thought that jury trials were so important that the U.S. Constitution covers them in three places: first in Article III, and again in the Sixth and Seventh Amendments. Here's what that founding document says.

Article III, Section 2

"The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury."

The Constitution didn't say much about rights until the Bill of Rights was added in 1791. Yet it did guarantee the right to trial by jury, an idea inherited from British common law. Starting in 1215, the Magna Carta, in particular, protected an English nobleman from being punished "except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land."

By colonial times, all "freeborn Englishmen" assumed the right to a jury trial. In 1774, the First Continental Congress declared that British subjects in America were entitled to "the great and inestimable privilege of being tried by peers." Two years later, the Declaration of Independence condemned the king for "depriving us . . . of the benefits of Trial by Jury."

The Sixth Amendment

"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed."

The Sixth Amendment demands that juries be impartial and local. Courts strive for impartiality in two ways. First, they draw juries from pools of citizens that must, by law, accurately represent the community. Second, they select jurors from the pool carefully, through "voir dire" (Anglo-French for "to speak the truth"). During voir dire, attorneys from both sides question prospective jurors to see if they are biased. Those found to be so are generally sent home.

Requiring local juries was partly a response to pre-Revolutionary War cases in which the British shipped colonists off to England to stand trial before unsympathetic jurors. It was also part of common law precedent. In a draft of the Sixth Amendment, James Madison wrote that juries should be made up of "freeholders of the vicinage" (common law parlance for "neighborhood property owners").

The Seventh Amendment

"In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law."

Though we now associate juries more with criminal cases, they were used to try civil cases first. The Seventh Amendment guarantees that their use in such cases will continue--at least as long as people continue to sue each other for sums exceeding $20.

The Seventh Amendment also explicitly preserves a common law tradition in which juries, and not judges, decide cases' facts. Judges answer questions of law. For example, a judge decides which evidence is legally admissible (a question of law), but a jury decides what that evidence actually proves (a question of fact). The judge is the legal expert. But the power to determine guilt or innocence, or civil liability, belongs to the community itself.