Sample Law Essay: The Trial by Jury - Should it be.
Therefore the importance of the jury system is that it could acquit a defendant, even when the law demanded a guilty verdict and it showed defendants that the trial by jury was not only a protection against injustice but also a loophole whereby real criminals could escape from.
A jury trial (or trial by jury) is a legal action in which a jury either makes a decision or makes findings of fact which are then applied by a judge. It is distinguished from a bench trial, in which a judge or panel of judges make all choices.
An Essay on the Trial by Jury written in 1852 by Lysander Spooner is an excellent treatise on the reason we have the jury system available as a right within the Anglo-Saxon justice system and an excellent point of beginning for the study of Constitutional and Common Law. An Essay on the Trial by Jury, Chapter II.Lysander Spooner, 1852.
The role of the jury has since evolved from the medieval times and was completely formed in the 18 th century into what it is today, with modern juries playing a vital role in assessing the facts of the case and, in the case of a criminal trial, determining whether the defendant is guilty beyond reasonable doubt, or in the case of a civil trial, deciding whether the claimant has the right to.
The bounds set to the power of the government, by the trial by jury, as will hereafter be shown, are these—that the government shall never touch the property, person, or natural or civil rights of an individual, against his consent, (except for the purpose of bringing them before a jury for trial,) unless in pursuance and execution of a judgment, or decree, rendered by a jury in each.
An Essay on the Trial By Jury. By LYSANDER SPOONER. NOTE. This volume, it is presumed by the author, gives what will generally be considered satisfactory evidence, though not all the evidence, of what the Common Law trial by jury really is. In a future volume, if it should be called for, it is designed to corroborate the grounds taken in this.
Essay on the Trial by Jury. Lysander SPOONER (1808 - 1897) FOR more than six hundred years that is, since Magna Carta, in 1215 there has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law, than that, in criminal cases, it is not only the right and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what was the.