TRIAL BY JURY. Urgent Need for Reform.

Free Lance, Volume I, Issue 46, 18 May 1901, Page 8

TRIAL BY JURY. Urgent Need for Reform.

THERE is great force in the remarks which the Chief Justice made m the Supreme Court the other day touching jury disagreements. Two separate juries had been empanelled to try a case of alleged bigamy, and on each occasion the jury failed to arrive at an agreement As a consequence, His Honor felt impelled to remark that he was aii aid the Legislature will have to adopt either the Scottish or the French system, and not insist on absolute unanimity It is only in English, American, and colonial jurisprudence that absolute unanimity on the part of a jury is required. • • • Common-sense and every-day experience furnish many reasons in support of the change suggested by the learned judge. Most of us are able to quote instances wherein one man out of sheer obstinacy, or perhaps through personal bias, has been able to neutralise the agreement of the other eleven, and render aboitive a costly trial. There are cases m which individuals have made it their boast that, through some personal pique or for trumpery reasons which had nothing whatever to do with the evidence adduced, they prevented any verdict being found. In any case, to require absolute unanimity from a jury of twelve men picked at random, and subjected to no test of competency, is to make our judicial system slow, costly, and inefficient. It renders it easy also for the juror who is corrupt or deficient m intelligence, or blunted in his sense of responsibility, to defeat the ends of justice Public opinion is rapidly changing m regard to the system of trial by jury. Time was when it was regarded as a kind of sacred fetish. People were taught to believe that if it were tampered with the British constitution would be bound to tumble to pieces. That sort of notion is fast perishing. The seamy side has been too often exposed to view. In more than one colonial community, men are found who openly profess their ability to pack a jury. It has been stated that the thing has been done over and over again for sufficient consideration Cases have occurred in which notoriously guilty men have escaped their just deserts because a jury has returned a verdict dead against the weight of evidence and in flat antagonism to the judge's summing up. • • # All these things have sunk deep into the colonial mind, and are slowly, but surely, ripening it into the condition for reform The tendency is to place the responsibility more upon the judges, and to have less and less recourse to the mixed jury. Justice is safer in the hands of men chosen for their probity and uprightness, whose minds have been trained to the sifting of evidence, and who will be keenly alive to the sacredness of the trust which the State confides to their hands. • • • At present, jury service is rendered grudgingly by the public. People arc taken away from their usual employment or business, very often at the greatest inconvenience to themselves, and in a frame of mind which makes it impossible for them to give that close attention to a perhaps in-

tricate case which will enable them to pass a sound judgment upon it. Altogether, the present methods arc crude and unsatisfactory. Unanimous verdicts will have to be no longer insisted on. And, in course of time, we shall lay aside the jury system altogether. Already the grand jury is practically doomed The petty jury will, in turn, follow it into the limbo of discarded institutions.