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A jury trial, or trial by jury, is a legal proceeding in which a jury makes a decision or findings of fact. It is distinguished from a bench trial in which a judge or panel of judges makes all decisions. Jury trials are increasingly used in a significant share of serious criminal cases in many common law judicial systems, but not all.
A citizen's right to a trial by jury is a central feature of the United States Constitution. [1] It is considered a fundamental principle of the American legal system. Laws and regulations governing jury selection and conviction/acquittal requirements vary from state to state (and are not available in courts of American Samoa), but the fundamental right itself is mentioned five times in the ...
The right to a jury trial has been enshrined in English law since Magna Carta in 1215, and is most common in serious cases, although the defendant can insist on a jury trial for most criminal cases. Jury trials in complex fraud cases have been described by some members and appointees of the Labour Party as expensive and time-consuming. [142]
Jury instructions, also known as charges or directions, are a set of legal guidelines given by a judge to a jury in a court of law. They are an important procedural step in a trial by jury, and as such are a cornerstone of criminal process in many common law countries. The purpose of instructions are to inform the jury about the legal ...
The Seventh Amendment (Amendment VII) to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. This amendment codifies the right to a jury trial in certain civil cases and inhibits courts from overturning a jury's findings of fact. An early version of the Seventh Amendment was introduced in Congress in 1789 by James Madison, along with ...
Jury selection. Jury selection is the selection of the people who will serve on a jury during a jury trial. The group of potential jurors (the "jury pool,” also known as the venire) is first selected from among the community using a reasonably random method. Jury lists are compiled from voter registrations and driver license or ID renewals.
A jury nullification advocacy group estimates that 3–4% of all jury trials involve nullification, [10] and a recent rise in hung juries (from an average of 5% to nearly 20% in some locales) is seen by some as indirect evidence that juries have begun to consider the validity or fairness of the laws themselves (though other reasons such as the ...
A Michigan Law Review article, published in 1978, asserted that young people, during that period, were under-represented on the nation's jury rolls. [11] A 2012 study from Duke University published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics investigated the effect of jury selection and racial composition on trial outcomes. The study found that black ...