Why are juries important to the legal system

If a particularly vulnerable person is the victim or an important prosecution witness, the accused might want a judge alone: a judge must dispassionately apply the law, and provide logical reasons which show she has done that, no matter how sad or sympathetic the plight of the victim might be.

Similarly, if the crime alleged is particularly violent and the evidence expected to be graphic, a judge might be a better choice, as he or she will be less likely swayed by the horror of what they are hearing and seeing than might be the case with a jury, who might let feelings of revulsion and anger sway their reasoning. In the most serious situations murder trials the Criminal Code requires the trial be in front of a jury unless both sides agree to have a judge sit alone. The theory is that in the most serious cases, where someone has died and someone faces imprisonment for the rest of his or her life, community representatives, under the guidance of a judge who knows the law, should make this important decision.

In murder trials, we can usually be satisfied that the final verdict has been reached after the careful consideration and close attention paid by 12 ordinary community members who have brought their common sense and everyday wisdom to bear upon the issues they have been told to consider. We view juries as a fundamental protector of our liberties and freedoms, — 12 ordinary, independent fellow citizens who can protect us from the whims and arbitrariness of decisions made by officials who are beholden to the sovereign, a local figure, or other arms of government.

When it comes to deciding who from our communities should sit on a jury, the process is designed to ensure independence and impartiality. The first step is to summon a large group of persons selected from the community at random, to attend a court sitting to choose a jury.

They make an effort to obtain as wide a cross-selection of community members as possible. However, The Supreme Court of Canada recently ruled, in relation to accused persons of a minority background, that they are not entitled to a jury pool which represents their group, or even one which has a proportionate number of their community, but rather, a panel which randomly represents the makeup of society at large.

Jury selection usually begins with dozens of people, and sometimes or , gathered together in a courtroom or other facility large enough to accommodate the group. Sometimes an even larger pool of persons is necessary to ultimately select 12 jurors when the trial is going to be quite long or the charges have been widely publicized. The presiding judge usually begins by explaining in general terms how the proceedings will unfold — the length of time the trial will likely take, who is the accused and who will be the lawyers and witnesses, and the reasons individuals might properly ask to be excused from jury duty.

This usually leads to many persons coming forward asking to be excused for various reasons such as health problems, work or school commitments which cannot be avoided, and travel which has been booked and paid for. As well, anyone who is related or otherwise closely connected to any of the participants is usually excused from jury duty for that trial, in order to ensure that all jurors are unbiased and impartial.

Unlike what we see on American media, in Canada most juries are selected relatively quickly, and with almost no questions. The Clerk of the Court will select possible jurors at random, and then the defence and the Crown decide whether that individual is someone they want on the jury. One by one, persons are chosen until there are 12 who will form the jury.

Randomly selected citizens will receive a summons to attend court. Once the jurors arrive at the courthouse, they wait to be randomly chosen to go to a specific courtroom as part of a jury panel. That potential juror can then either. Some Australian jurisdictions have reduced the number of challenges a defendant can use. The UK has done away with this process altogether as it interferes with the important perception that juries are fairly chosen and therefore represent the community.

Several Australian studies confirm our juries reflect a cross-section of our community in terms of cultural mix, age and gender balance. Juries are more likely to be better educated than the ordinary member of the public. Jurors are forbidden from having any prior intimate knowledge of the trial, from privately communicating with anyone involved in the trial and from doing their own research.

Maintaining the impartiality of jurors has become problematic in the digital age. Last century, courts used to successfully make orders to suppress potentially prejudicial information such as prior convictions. Jurors are told by the judge not to look at any media reports on their case. But jurors on trials of high profile defendants may not be able to avoid the barrage of negative pre-trial publicity.

US research suggests jurors who are exposed to negative publicity are significantly more likely to judge the defendant guilty compared to subjects exposed to less pre-trial publicity. New South Wales, Queensland, the ACT, South Australia and Western Australia allow a defendant to apply for trial by judge without a jury when prejudicial publicity is perceived to be significant.

But there is no research that confirms a judge sitting alone without a jury is any better at resisting prejudicial publicity. Read more: Trial by judge alone may not be the answer to giving high-profile defendants a fair hearing. A typical jury trial will take fewer than ten days.

Those who argue for trial by judge will have to accept that judges make mistakes and they are not infallible. But what if the judge makes a mistake of fact, chooses to believe the wrong witness, one that only a minority of the jurors would have believed? There is no remedy for that kind of mistake. There is another powerful reason why trial by jury is necessary.

In this age of mass media, most people derive their knowledge of what goes on in a court from what they read in the paper and see on television. If all that citizens know of the criminal justice system is what they read in the papers and see on TV, they are going to get a misleading impression of how it works and that misleading impression can corrode their faith in the system.

You may wonder when you read the newspaper report of a case how a jury could have arrived at its verdicts, but you will only have heard a fraction of the evidence that the jury heard.

By bringing ordinary citizens into the system and placing them at the very heart of the decision-making process, trial by jury exposes the criminal justice system to their scrutiny while ensuring they gain first-hand experience of how that system works.

Trial by jury helps the criminal justice system reflect the values and standards of the general public. What last week's report shows beyond reasonable doubt is that is exactly what juries do and, for all our sakes, they must be allowed to carry on doing it. This article is more than 11 years old.