Trial By Jury Essay

Trial by jury is a process in which the defendant is being put on trial in the Crown Court by a group of individuals who share the same social class, also known as “peers” (Joyce, 2012). According to the Juries Act (1974) to take part in jury service you have to be between the ages of 18 and 65 and have been living in the United Kingdom for at least five years. The role of the jury is to sit in the courtroom with the defendant and prosecutor and observe the proceedings in order to come to a judgement whether the defendant is guilty of the crime they are being put on trial for or of they are in fact innocent (Joyce, 2012). The jury acts as a sort of unbiased “audience” that watch the case unfold in order to come to a decision. They withhold any form of judgement until the end of the trial. Jury Service “brings out the ordinary

An example of this would be the ‘Birmingham Six’; “The prosecution evidence rested upon three legs: confessions which the defendants claimed were beaten out of them; forensic tests which the defendants claimed were inherently unreliable … and highly circumstantial evidence” (Walker & Starmer, 1999, p47). This again proves that trial by jury, at times, is not the best possible method to adjudicate on guilt or innocence. Another example of this is the Guildford Four, who were accused of bombings in Guilford and Woolwich in 1974. They were given life sentences due to the police using inappropriate ways of trying to get confessions out of them in order to prove them guilty; they were released in 1989 (Joyce, 2006). These miscarriages of justice prove that adversarial justice (and trial by jury) is not always accurate as many of the facts presented in the courtroom may be false and tampered with, like the ‘Birmingham Six’ and the ‘Guildford