What is the origin of trials by jury? What is the origin of trials by jury? Were juries used in Old Testament, Greek, Roman, or Inquisition trials?
The modern jury trial in common law countries (i.e. those with legal systems based upon those of English law) derives from 12th century English practice as it evolved over time in England, and is frozen in time to some extent in U.S. practice, by the nature of the jury trial as an institution at the time that it became a constitutional right in the United States in 1789. The English jury system emerged in the 12th century in the wake of the Norman conquest of 1066 CE, and codified Norman customary law, particularly among its soldiers in courts-martial and had some resemblance to modern courts-martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for the United States military such as the notion that you could be judge's only by your peers in rank or your superiors, although it subsequently evolved in English civil practice. (England also developed in parallel non-jury courts of equity as a division of the tax collection department in England, a set of courts that were merged with courts of law in most places in the U.S. in the 19th century, the remains a distinctive source of U.S. jurisprudence in matters which are decided solely by judges. This short summary also ignores features like the coroners' juries and grand juries of English derived practice.) The civil jury is now almost extinct in England itself, and in most common law countries other than the U.S., except for a handful of kinds of cases (e.g. defamation, civil fraud, false imprisonment, and eminent domain cases), and in serious criminal cases. Other cases in England are now handled in the first instance by a single judge at the trial court level in most cases. Outside the common law countries, first instance trials in serious cases are usually conducted by a panel of three or five judges, with a lead judge presiding over the conduct of the matter. Most jury-like systems outside of common law countries are limited to serious criminal matters, and often involve a hybrid of judges and specially selected citizens with exceptional ("blue ribbon") qualifications who deliberate together with the judges. These systems were mostly adopted after World War II in imitation of U.S. and English practice, but some as early as the 15th century in Europe. The Continental European practices described in an answer by @Geremia, and likewise Greek direct democracy based trial and Sumerian trials come from a tradition that was abandoned no later than the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe as civil codes on the model of the French and German civil codes were adopted, and often much earlier. These practices are not ancestral to the current practice of jury trials in modern legal systems. Juries were not described as a means of adjudication in the Bible. In the ancient democratic Greek city-states, some city-states had direct democracy of landed males citizens and those citizens met collectively in town meeting style to address both legislative and judicial matters. The governance practice of Caribbean pirates, or some isolated bands and tribes, of small early New England Puritan communities, and of small revolutionary military units, have some similarities to this kind of practice, all of which were small communities organized on a principle of direct democracy and which arose more or less independently of each other. Mostly, in the Roman Empire, judges or regulated private arbitrators resolved the matters that were vested in civil and criminal juries today in places that still have them. Some serious matters at times in Rome were decided by quasi-juries in a Greek town meeting like format with hundreds of jurors in a stadium or amphitheater. But this was never a routine means by which justice was metted out. Inquisitorial trials were a subset of canon law, and canon law is generally carried out by deputized clergy, in a process that was more written than oral, and in that involved active investigation by the judges rather than passive consideration of adversary presented evidence (giving rise to the modern inquisitorial judicial systems common in Continental Europe, Latin America, and much of Asia (where Maoist or Islamic legal systems are not primarily influences). In Medieval Times, the predominant practice was for decisions to be made by the ranking local feudal lord, or his delegate, and the role of the delegate of a feudal lord is directly ancestral to that of the common law legal system's judges, which is one of the reasons that common law judges have powers such as contempt of court, and immunities from liability not available to judges elsewhere. Select institutions in the Holy Roman Empire and what is now Germany in the 15th to 19th centuries appear to have been devised in imitation of the English jury system.
Carl may not do this, as he would be prohibited from making this argument at trial. At trial, evidence must be relevant, meaning that it makes a fact of consequence more or less likely to be true. Because the trial is meant to determine whether Carl is or is not guilty, his promises of future philanthropy have no bearing on the matter. And even if they somehow did, Carl still would not be able to tell the jury about them because they would be blocked under Rule 403, which excludes evidence because its probative value is substantially outweighed by its risk of biasing or confusing the jury. If Carl attempts to make these statements anyway, he risks a mistrial, which means he has to start over with with a new jury. In some jurisdictions, Carl may, however, be permitted to make this argument during the sentencing phase, where the court can properly consider the societal effects of whatever punishment it imposes. At this point, though, it's obviously a little late for Carl, as it presumes he has been convicted.
Why should they? If a person is accused of a crime, say murder, why should more evidence be needed to convict them if they are a high ranking government official than if they are just an ordinary person? Why should their trial be conducted differently? If convicted, why should their punishment be different? Yes, you can run societies that way and people have and do but it isn’t very fair is it? Equality before the law does not imply any other sort of equality People high up in the government have more power and authority than others but if they are alleged to have broken the law they are treated the same as anybody else.
Short answer, yes, jurors will typically render a decision of guilt vs. innocence. This is pretty common in nations where the legal system is derived from British Common Law (about 2 billion people world wide live in a Common Law nation). The U.S. is unique in that it uses juries for Civil Trials as well as Criminal Trials. The right to a trial by jury is guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution in which the 6th amendment guarantees the right to trial by impartial jury (contrary to popular opinion, it is not a jury of peers, as this alludes to the Peerage systems, which the U.S. never adopted). That line is from the Magna Carta which was influential in the drafting of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. A jury usually consists of a panel of 12 people pulled from the locality of the crime, unless a change of venue has been granted because the alleged crime is so well known an impartial jury cannot be seated from the population. The jury will hear all the evidence from both sides, as well as opening and closing arguments. They will be provided &quot;jury instructions&quot; by the judge and must find if the evidence presented (The Facts) meet the criteria for a conviction of a charged crime (The Law). In all Jury Trials, a Jury fills the role of &quot;Trier of Fact&quot; while the Judge fills the role of &quot;Trier of Law.&quot; While the judge has the education background to understand what the law says constitutes a crime and how to find that law as well as how to make sure the defense and plaintiff/prosecution make fair arguments, any random group of 12 people can understand facts and put together whose story they believe, the defense's or the prosecution's. In the case of an innocent person being convicted due to inept defense, this does happen and is horrible, but there are recourses in the form of appeals courts, which can overturn a trial and order that a new one be held (a mistrial, essentially, the original trial never happened and the person is legally innocent. Try again and do it proper this time.) Ineffective assistance of counsel is a valid grounds for appeal of a conviction and does happen. In the other scenario, an inept prosecution, this does happen as well and it's not the fault of the jury that the guilty person went free, but for the prosecution. The prosecutor is at a disadvantage in every criminal case to balance out the fact that their office has more resources to bring to bear then most defendants. Among these handicaps is that their &quot;story&quot; about what happened must not have any &quot;plot holes&quot; in it (beyond a reasonable doubt evidentiary standard of proof) and that the prosecution has to convince 12 people that their story is the only way this could happen (try convincing 12 random people to agree to anything more complicated than &quot;the sky is blue and grass is green&quot;) and they only have one shot to do it (Double Jeopardy essentially bars the prosecutor's office from initiating the appeals process... and blocks someone who is declared innocent from doing it because why the hell would you want to?!). Here, the problem is that the Prosecutor doesn't have to charge the accused right away and has a bit of generous time to investigate (depends on statute of limitations on particular crimes) ... but the right to a speedy trial means that once charges are filed, the clock starts on how long the prosecution has to bring the case. Delay to long and the judge will give a directed verdict that the person is innocent because the prosecution wasn't ready. The importance of this fact that is a staple belief of Common Law is in the &quot;Blackstone Ratio&quot; which states: Better that 10 guilty people go free than a single innocent person suffers So the jury finding the prosecution inept is certainly the prosecutor's problem, not the jury's problem. It's a feature not a bug. If an innocent person does suffer, then we have a bug and we must see that it is corrected. As a final note, the jury also has the power of Jury Nullification of the Law. In the U.S. it's not really certain if Jury Nullification invalidates the law completely but in effect, it allows the Jury to declare a person innocent because, while they believe the prosecution's story that the defendant did what they were accused of, they don't believe this person should be convicted because they believe the crime they're accused of should have never been a crime in the first place.
Jurors don't have a "right" to jury nullification per-se. The "right" of jury nullification is really just a logical consequence of other rights that the jury and the defendant have The American jury draws its power of nullification from its right to render a general verdict in criminal trials, the inability of criminal courts to direct a verdict no matter how strong the evidence, the Fifth Amendment’s Double Jeopardy Clause, which prohibits the appeal of an acquittal,[2] and the fact that jurors can never be punished for the verdict they return. In fact, the court doesn't want juries to nullify, because that undermines the rule of law, and they might penalize lawyers tho try to argue for nullification The 1895 decision in Sparf v. U.S.,[24] written by Justice John Marshall Harlan held that a trial judge has no responsibility to inform the jury of the right to nullify laws. It was a 5-4 decision. This decision, often cited, has led to a common practice by United States judges to penalize anyone who attempts to present legal argument to jurors and to declare a mistrial if such argument has been presented to them. In some states, jurors are likely to be struck from the panel during voir dire if they will not agree to accept as correct the rulings and instructions of the law as provided by the judge.[25] Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification_in_the_United_States As far as how would juror's know about jury nullification, they could have read about the process before being selected for jury duty. Some Juries might also rule contrary to their instructions without actually having heard about jury nullification because they have some sort of sympathy with the defendant.
The most innocent of your scenarios is "against the rules", so less innocent acts fair worse. The idea behind researching legal theory and precedent (presumably not presidents) is that surely it is good for a juror to know what the law is. But that thinking is wrong. The judge will instruct you as to what the law is, and will also instruct you that "the law" is limited to what he says it is. I will draw on the instructions for an antitrust case, Best Buy v. Toshiba, HannStar. The core instruction is: It is your duty to find the facts from all the evidence in the case. To those facts you will apply the law as I give it to you. The preliminary instructions (the pattern instructions for California civil trials) say the same basic thing: At the end of the trial, I will explain the law that you must follow to reach your verdict. You must follow the law as I explain it to you, even if you do not agree with the law. The judge instructs the jury that: When a party has the burden of proof on any claim or affirmative defense by a preponderance of the evidence, it means you must be persuaded by the evidence that the claim or affirmative defense is more probably true than not true. Your research might find alternative statements of the law out there, which seem entirely plausible. That doesn't matter: you have to set aside whatever ideas (about the law) that you've gotten from anybody besides the judge. In fact, if the judge makes a (serious) mistake and rules against a party in a manner that is contrary to established law, and you know this (it doesn't matter how), you are supposed to apply the law (including rulings during trial as to admissibility) as given to you by the judge. As for a case of a juror knowing that the judge was mistaken (specifically, knowing based on his pre-existing knowledge of statutes and case law – not based on forbidden research during a trial), we can get the "should" from the absolute instruction to follow the judges instructions. Additionally, if you read transcripts of voir dire (not a trivial task), you can observe judges probing attorneys who happen to be in the prospective pool, asking questions to determine whether that person can just do as they are told. But it would be difficult to establish a "hard rule". There never will be an instruction that says "You must follow my orders even if you know for a fact that my orders are wrong" – jury instructions never admit the possibility of judicial error.
You will most likely be instructed to not share or even use your own translation of the testimony. In California, the instruction on translations is: Some testimony may be given in [insert name or description of language other than English]. An interpreter will provide a translation for you at the time that the testimony is given. You must rely on the translation provided by the interpreter, even if you understand the language spoken by the witness. Do not retranslate any testimony for other jurors. If you believe the court interpreter translated testimony incorrectly, let me know immediately by writing a note and giving it to the (clerk/bailiff). In People v. Cabrera 230 Cal.App.3d 300, it was ruled that supplying a competing translation is juror misconduct, see also People v. Marshall, 50 Cal. 3d 907 (it is misconduct for a juror to inject expertise into the deliberations, referring to the fact that a juror "informed the jury ... [that he had a] background in law enforcement, and that the lack of evidence did not mean the defendant has no criminal background, because juvenile records are automatically sealed at 18 years of age." Florida has a similar instruction: The evidence you are to consider is only that provided through the official court [interpreters] [translators]. Although some of you may know (language used), it is important that all jurors consider the same evidence. Therefore, you must accept the English [interpretation] [translation]. You must disregard any different meaning. If, however, during the testimony there is a question as to the accuracy of the English interpretation, you should bring this matter to my attention immediately by raising your hand. You should not ask your question or make any comment about the interpretation in the presence of the other jurors, or otherwise share your question or concern with any of them. I will take steps to see if your question can be answered and any discrepancy resolved. If, however, after such efforts a discrepancy remains, I emphasize that you must rely only upon the official English interpretation as provided by the court interpreter and disregard any other contrary interpretation.
Your question slightly misrepresents what the article says: Yes, the judge denied the motion which led to the collapse of the case, he did not make a ruling on the substance of the case. The distinction is significant to my mind as the judge was using non-evidentiary knowledge (i.e. what he read in the paper) to make a decision on process; in this case a process that would have put a lot of people to a lot of inconvenience. It would not be proper for the judge to have used such knowledge to inform a judgement. It is also not clear from the article if the academic paper in question was actually introduced by the defendant as evidence. If that was the case then it is only right and proper for the judge to consider it. As to why a judge is allowed to read the news and a jury is not, I can offer several ideas: A judge must document their reasoning process in a judgement which is subject to review - if they were to make a decision based on matters not supported by the evidence then an appeals court could correct it. Alternatively, juries are specifically prohibited from revealing their reasoning process to anyone. Judges do their jobs for years, perhaps a whole career - to prohibit them from consuming media is a) unworkable and b) a serious impediment on their lifestyle. Juries are empaneled for weeks or months - such sacrifices are more reasonable. Judges are (supposedly) trained and impartial professionals who are more readily able to make the distinction between evidence and news. Newsworthy cases are relatively rare