American jurors are impotent





In a Guest Opinion March 6, Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse (CALA) made some recommendations intended to improve citizen response to jury service. CALA appears to have missed the point.


Jury service is a much unloved obligation. And rightly so. It is demeaning and deceptive. The onus might be lessened, although not removed, if the jurors had the authority to determine the trial verdict, but they do not. Jurors have been systematically crippled to the point that today they lend legitimacy to judicial exhibitions that are perilously close to the "show trials" of the Stalinist ’30s.


The judge’s instructions to the jury prohibit:


1. granting of mercy to the accused


2. judging the law as being unjust


3. using any information in the verdict that was not presented in the trial


4. forming an opinion before all the testimony is in


5. taking notes


Item No. 1 violates the religious training of most people. Item No. 2 violates a right that was won at great cost by early English and later American juries. Item No. 3 requires that only dolts be permitted on the jury. Item No. 4 requires a thinking process that is alien to science and incompatible with human thought. Item No. 5 requires that conclusions about the credibility of witnesses and the statistical reliability of testimony—e.g., eyewitness identification—be committed to imperfect human memory.


The final constraint is the extremely nosy questionnaire that each juror must fill out. Its only purpose is to provide lawyers with cause for challenging potential jurors.


Is it any wonder that citizens avoid jury service like the plague?


Wm. O. Felsman


Woodland Hills



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