A Quote by John Henry Wigmore
Trial by jury must be preserved. It is the best system ever invented for a free people in the world's history.
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Trial by jury must and shall be preserved! Amidst the throng of crude sacrilegisms ... that assail us nowadays in the legal sanctuary, none is more shortsighted, none more dangerous, than the proposal to abolish trial by jury.
Cross-examination is beyond any doubt the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth. ... Cross-examination, not trial by jury, is the great and permanent contribution of the Anglo-American system of law to improved methods of trial-procedure.
The humorist who invented trial by jury played a colossal practical joke upon the world, but since we have the system we ought to try and respect it. A thing which is not thoroughly easy to do, when we reflect that by command of the law a criminal juror must be an intellectual vacuum, attached to a melting heart and perfectly macaronian bowels of compassion.
The trial by jury is a trial by 'the country,' in contradistinction to a trial by the government. The jurors are drawn by lot from the mass of the people, for the very purpose of having all classes of minds and feelings, that prevail among the people at large, represented in the jury.
In my fifty years of experience and memory, I have seen the most amazing increase in the standard of living of a people ever achieved anywhere in the world. This is why I am so sure that our system of free competition and industrial development is sound and must be preserved.
In our system, we leave questions of fact to a jury. But to render a verdict, a jury must know the law. For this, we rely upon jury instructions. Instructions are supposed to translate the law into lay terms that the jury can apply to the facts as they determine them.
Free enterprise is the best economic system in the history of the world, because it is the only system where you can make poor people richer and you don't have to make rich people poor.
I believed there was enough evidence to go to trial. Grand jury said there wasn't. Okay, fine. Do I have a right to disagree with the grand jury? Many Americans believe O.J. Simpson was guilty. A jury said he wasn't. So I have as much right to question a jury as they do. Does it make somebody a racist? No! They just disagreed with the jury. So did I.
Law and justice are from time to time inevitably in conflict ... . The jury ... adjusts the general rule of law to the justice to the particular case. Thus the odium of inflexible rules of law is avoided, and popular satisfaction is preserved ... That is what jury trial does. It supplies that flexibility of legal rules which is essential to justice and popular contentment.
I do not apologize for advertising. I think it is as vital to the preservation of freedom in my country as the free exercise of publishing a newspaper or the free exercise of building a church or the free exercise of the right of trial by jury.
There was an interesting development in the CBS-Westmoreland trial:
both sides agreed that after the trial, Andy Rooney would be allowed to
talk to the jury for three minutes about little things that annoyed him
during the trial.
If rowing is a trial then the ergometer is the courtroom, the meter is the jury. And an honest jury at that, because the numbers do not lie.
The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.
The average juror is not Mr. Spock. If he were, then a trial-court judge's job would be much easier. He could instruct the jury in broad strokes - instructing only as to the bare elements of the crime, perhaps - and be confident that the jury would deduce all of the finer-grained implications that must logically follow.
Trial by jury is a wise distribution of power which exceeds all other modes of trial.
In civil or criminal litigation in a jury case, the only way for a defendant to avoid a trial is for a judge to rule that there was no evidence from which the jury could find for the other side.
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