NCJ Number
163076
Journal
Polygraph Volume: 24 Issue: 4 Dated: (1995) Pages: 290-296
Date Published
1995
Length
7 pages
Annotation
This paper traces the history of ways various societies have sought to distinguish between the guilty and the innocent, reviews the history of the use of the jury, and considers the character and selection of contemporary juries.
Abstract
In various societies, great faith has been placed in trial by ordeal, all the way from the Old Testament to the Australian outback. The ordeal usually involved fire, water, or poison. In some cultures, those who survived an administration of poison were deemed innocent, although usually extremely ill; under Saxon law, if you could carry several pounds of glowing red-hot iron in your bare hands for nine steps or walk barefoot over nine red-hot plowshares without getting any blisters, you were innocent of any charges. In Britain, Africa, and parts of Asia, plunging your arm into boiling water, oil, or lead without the usual results proved innocence. Alongside trial by ordeal, the Saxons were developing a human jury system, but it was available only to persons known in the community to be honest. Justice was still a neighborhood matter under early juries. Everyone was supposed to know everyone else and have some first-hand knowledge of what happened. Rather recently, however, this concept has been reversed, and juries are supposed to know nothing of the case or the defendant prior to being placed on the jury. It is more and more difficult, given the thorough media reporting on criminal investigations, to find jurors sufficiently isolated to qualify. It is questionable whether prospective jurors who avoid media coverage are sufficiently interested in what goes on around them to make good jurors. Isolated and ill-informed people do not necessarily make good decisionmakers. How do we choose among strangers not necessarily wise but merely registered to vote? Once the blatantly prejudiced have been excused, both sides take up the peremptory challenge of turning down jurors for the way they look, dress, or comb their hair. The new profession of jury- selection consultant has developed under the awareness that a person's background and views on issues related to the case can be used to predict how they would decide the case. The differing agendas of the prosecution and the defense complicate jury selection. Whatever it may read or watch, however, the modern jury does not know what it was designed to know, that is, its neighbors, thus making the jury susceptible to manipulation by clever, dramatic, and persuasive attorneys.