A Quote by John Henry Wigmore
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.
Related Quotes
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.
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.
Trial by jury must be preserved. It is the best system ever invented for a free people in the world's history.
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.
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.
Trial by jury is a wise distribution of power which exceeds all other modes of trial.
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.
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.
If the federal constitution is to be construed so far in connection with the state constitutions, as to leave the trial by jury in civil causes, for instance, secured; on the same principles it would have left the trial by jury in criminal causes, the benefits of the writ of habeas corpus, etc. secured; they all stand on the same footing; they are the common rights of Americans, and have been recognized by the state constitutions.
The trial by jury might safely be introduced into a despotic government, if the jury were to exercise no right of judging of the law, or the justice of the law.
The grand solid merit of jury trial is that the jurors ... are selected at the last moment from the multitude of citizens. They cannot be known beforehand, and they melt back into the multitiude after each trial.
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.
We opposed unlimited detention without trial. We stood up for trial by jury as well. And of course we spoke up for asylum seekers and for the most vulnerable in our society.
I view myself primarily as a trial lawyer who happens to be writing, as opposed to a writer who happens to be a trial lawyer, so the audience is like a jury to me.
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.
Related Authors
Barack Obama Quotes
American
President
Benjamin Franklin Quotes
American
Politician
Cassandra Clare Quotes
American
Author
Deepak Chopra Quotes
American
Speaker
Donald Trump Quotes
American
President
Frederick Lenz Quotes
American
Author
George W. Bush Quotes
American
President
Henry David Thoreau Quotes
American
Author
Hillary Clinton Quotes
American
Politician
Mark Twain Quotes
American
Writer
Noam Chomsky Quotes
American
Activist
Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
American
Philosopher
Rick Riordan Quotes
American
Author
Rush Limbaugh Quotes
American
Entertainer
Sherrilyn Kenyon Quotes
American
Writer
Thomas Jefferson Quotes
American
President