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A jury contains twelve lay people who’ve been randomly selected and sworn to conduct an impartial verdict as to whether a defendant is guilty or not guilty beyond all reasonable doubt in a criminal trial. The purpose of the jury is to provide a fair and just outcome based on the facts to reach a verdict and this can’t be achieved by judges alone as the decision would be prejudicial and create unfairness. As juries are unaware of any details, their opinions don’t favor one side. There should be no biases in court and one’s fate shouldn’t be decided by one person alone hence why having a jury allows individuals to have a fair trial. This creates a better judgment. In addition, a jury consists of ordinary people who want justice to be served correctly. This essay will discuss whether it is important for the selection of the jury to be random.
The Juries Act 1974 is the governing legislation that controls the jury system by clarifying who qualifies for jury service and establishing the right to challenge jurors. The Crown court recruits jurors to hear a case. Their names are selected from the electoral register which is randomly done by the computer. Those who are summoned should attend jury service and they must notify the court instantly if they can’t appear. If they don’t return the jury summons form or arrive for their service, then this can result in a fine of £1,000. Those who have agreed to serve on the jury must attend for ten days and if the case lasts longer than two weeks, jurors would be expected to stay beyond their service. You will be eternally disqualified from jury service if you’ve been sentenced to life imprisonment and you won’t be permitted to serve as a juror for ten years if, in the last ten years, you have served a prison sentence. You’re also disqualified if you’re currently on bail. If you fail to tell the court you’re a prohibited person, you could be fined up to £5000. In addition, you can be disqualified if you are mentally disordered. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 is also capable of restricting the role of the jury by imposing more limitations on the eligibility criteria.
Jurors should be vetted, meaning they should be checked for sustainability. There are two forms of vetting. A routine police check is where a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check is done on each juror to make sure they’ve not been disqualified. This can be seen in R v Mason [1980]. A more thorough, wider background check is essential to give further protection against the chance of bias. This can be referred to as an Authorised Jury Check. The Attorney General said that vetting of juries should only take place in exceptional cases which involve national security and terrorist cases and it can only be done with the permission of the Attorney General.
When the jurors enter the court, they will be challenged by the defense and prosecution. You will be removed if your presence represents a ‘real danger of bias’. The two challenges are to array and for the cause. To array will test the jury on the basis that it’s been chosen in an unrepresentative or biased way. A challenge to the array was used in R v Ford [1989] where it was held that if the jury was chosen at random then it can’t be challenged because it wasn’t multi-racial. A challenge for cause will test the juror’s right to be on the jury. To be successful, the challenging party must provide a genuine reason why the juror must not sit on the case. If these jurors aren’t removed from the jury, there’s potential for the case conviction to be quashed due to a miscarriage of justice.
The role of the jury is a controversial part of the judicial system. Some say it’s important that jury selection is random. Juries should be selected at random as it ensures that there will be a trial by your peers rather than one that has been manipulated. The Magna Carta laid out the binding rule of law and included the concept of a right to a fair trial. Part of this is to be “judged by a jury of your peers”. This means that they are no more experienced in the law than the people they are judging.
The jury can show public confidence as it maintains the right to be tried by one’s peers. Lord Devlin quoted “Trial by jury is more than an instrument of justice and more than one wheel of the constitution. It is the lamp that shows that freedom lives”. This displays the fairness of a jury trial. Rather than following the law, jurors tend to act with their own common sense. This can be demonstrated in the case of R v Wang [2005], where a man was charged with having a blade in a public place. The judge told the jury to find him guilty, but it was argued that the jury should be allowed to decide on the evidence what a fair verdict was despite what the law said the outcome should be. No one can tell a jury to find a guilty verdict. A jury must decide based on what is fair as they should be independent and be free from bias.
Although jurors are chosen at random and aren’t involved in the case, they may still have prejudice which can affect the verdict. Bias may encompass deliberate hostility, inadvertent knowledge of the defendant’s bad character, alleged racism, acquaintance with prosecution witnesses, or a close nexus with the case in some way. Some jurors are racially biased. In the case of Sander v United Kingdom [2000], jurors made racist comments and jokes. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) held the judge should have discharged the jury due to the danger of racial bias and the right to a fair trial under the Human Rights Act 1998. Racial bias is unjustified in law and is also belittling of the members of the jury.
Jurors may lack experience and cannot make fair judgments. This could be a reason why the random selection is negative as their absence of knowledge could result in an incorrect decision as they are unable to understand the distinction in the law. The Ministry of Justice commissioned research in 2010 in which it was reported that 60 percent of jurors do not understand the judge’s legal directions when they retire to consider their verdicts. The report stated that ‘While over half of the jurors perceived the judge’s directions as easy to understand, only a minority (31%) actually understood the directions fully in the legal terms used by the judge’. Also, juries acquit more than magistrates do which shows the inability to perform their function properly. Lord Denning argues that “Jurors are summoned who are not sufficiently intelligent or educated to perform their task” and argues that the jury should be chosen like magistrates. A case that shows jurors are incapable is R v Young [1995] where the Court of Appeal ordered a retrial of a man convicted of double murder because four of the jurors had tried to contact the victims using an Ouija board. Also, the secrecy of the jury room may protect jurors from pressure but secrecy means the reason for the decision is not known and the jury’s understanding of the case cannot be checked as no reason has to be given for the verdict which can be demonstrated in R v Mirza [2004].
I agree it is important that jury selection is random as it’s fairer and less likely to be biased. Although some jurors may dislike having to serve, jury selection is a vital part of the legal process. The random selection method ensures that race, gender, religion, or other prejudices do not influence jury selection and helps all individuals to get a fair trial. However, there are debates about the selection process. There are several areas where the criminal justice system should better assist jurors in performing their vital role. It should become more representative and diverse in relation to racial bias and jurors should be more widely represented than they are. Also, jury selection could provide a solution to the problem of inexperienced people making the wrong choice so that they have the correct knowledge and capacity to give verdicts.
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