By: Judge Mark Ward
Each week three-to-five-hundred citizens are called to jury service in Shelby County. Some prospective jurors look forward to their community service and approach the task with enthusiasm. Others see it as forced labor and begrudgingly show up hoping to say the ‘magic words’ to get excused. Most people fall somewhere between these two extremes and, although they would rather not have to serve, do so out of civic duty or because they believe they have no other option.
As one of the judges who preside over jury trials in Shelby County, I am constantly talking with jurors during their orientation. My goal is to explain the importance of the jury in the American system, to encourage jurors to enthusiastically participate in the process with an open mind, and to thank them for their service. What follows is a summary of the thoughts I share with prospective jurors.
If you go back far enough in the annals of history, you will find that people devised different methods of settling disputes and determining guilt or innocence. One method was to place a stone in the bottom of a giant cauldron containing boiling oil and require the accused to dip his arm into the oil to retrieve the stone. The notion was that the innocent would not be burned while a guilty man would. Not surprisingly everyone was found guilty. This ‘caldron’ method was ultimately replaced by the much more sophisticated practice of binding an accused’s arms and legs before dropping him in the largest body of water in the district. If the accused drowned, he was guilty. If he somehow managed to float, he was innocent. Again, most people seemed to be guilty. Time passed and with progress came even more sophisticated methods of administering justice. The most widely known was “trial by combat.” If there was a dispute between citizens or a dispute between the king and a citizen, a representative of each party would simply fight to the death. It was believed that God would intervene in the combat and that the person who survived was innocent, while the person who died was guilty.
By the time of the American Revolution, such methods of administering justice had long fallen out of use and the right of Englishmen to a trial by a jury of citizens was well recognized. Despite this fact, trial by jury was often denied by the crown for those living in the colonies. Denial of a jury of peers allowed the King’s magistrate complete power over the colonists.