Taking A Stand: Jurors are citizens not law graduates
How can an average person be expected to decide the guilt or innocence of a person given the confusing and often complex way the legal system is set up?
For those of you who have served as jurors in criminal cases over the past few years, you likely know what I mean. The law has become so complex that it is difficult, if not impossible, for a person without law school training to understand it all. This, in turn, tends to threaten our system of justice as a trial by a jury of our peers has become more of a trial by a jury of confused people.
More and more I’m seeing juries come back in the midst of deliberations to ask the court questions concerning the law. This, after they have to absorb what can be well over an hour of jury charge from the judge where the law is explained. Now I don’t know about you, but when I was in school, a teacher was lucky to get 20 minutes of attention out of me – tops. Now, when you consider a litany of legal terms being tossed out at you, combined with a long trial added to the post-lunch slumber, how much do you think an average person will absorb?
It’s not as simple as it used to be either. In the old days you were either guilty of the crime charged or not. Nowadays there are a ton of lesser included offenses to most crimes. Under a crime like murder you have lesser included offenses like second-degree murder, manslaughter, reckless homicide, criminally negligent homicide and perhaps others. And, in addition to those, you have attempts on each crime. Even if it was a crime that was obviously completed, they charge the attempts, something I’ve found to be ridiculous.
Making matters worse is the law does not allow jurors to know jail terms for various crimes. This is done so the jurors do not do the judge’s job, but instead, that they stick simply to guilt or innocence based on the proof. While this may be a noble notion, it simply doesn’t work. Jurors very often will block out the exact wording of the law, and try to base the conviction on the amount of time they believe the person deserves. Seeing many jurors are unaware of the range of punishment, this sometimes leads to major mistakes.
Case in point are convictions on the charge of criminally negligent homicide as a lesser included offense to murder. Sure, the crime sounds bad, but in actuality it’s the least severe felony you can commit, carrying one to two years in prison. However, I’ve seen jurors pick this option in cases where the proof cannot possibly support a conviction on that charge. It’s obvious jurors felt the charge carried much more time.
Hey, if you want to look at the extent of juror confusion, you can look to something as basic as reasonable doubt. They tell you to convict if you find guilt beyond reasonable doubt, yet no one can tell jurors definitely what reasonable doubt is. Every judge I’ve ever heard has a different view on what is reasonable doubt. Some say to be able to rest easy with a choice, some use percentages such as 80 percent while others use a gray line approach of calling it a moral certainty.
If we want our system to be truly fair we must streamline it, make it more user friendly when it comes to jurors. We should also finally, after more than 200 years as a system, define reasonable doubt instead of leaving it to the imagination of jurors. If a person is going to volunteer their time as a juror, they deserve better than to be given a confusing task which has become even more difficult in just the past five years thanks to the wording of the law.
Duane Sherrill is a reporter for the Standard. He can be reached at 473-2191 or by e-mail at [email protected].