Jury trial

This article argues that, given the current pervasive uncertainty about the reliability of jury deliberation, we ought to treat it with epistemic humility. I further argue that epistemic humility should be expressed and enforced by turning jury deliberation from a mandatory rule of the jury trial to a waivable right of the defendant. I consider two main objections to my argument: the first one concerns the putative self-defeatingness of humility attitudes; the second objection points to the burdensomeness of granting an unconditional jury deliberation waiver to the defendant.

This chapter provides a descriptive and analytical examination of the requirement for lay jurors to give reasons for their decisions. In the 2010 case of Taxquet v. Belgium, the European Court of Human Right announced a new right for criminal defendants “to understand verdicts.” This jurisprudence has prompted a number of Council of Europe countries to overhaul their criminal procedure, including France, which now requires that its mixed courts, in which professional and lay judges deliberate collectively, justify their decisions on guilt or innocence. Descriptively, the chapter presents the Strasbourg court’s position as well as the French response to it, which have both been heralded as moral advances for criminal defendants. Analytically, the paper considers the values and purposes of reason-giving. What is this turn to heightened reason-giving trying to achieve?

I argue that while both the European Court of Human Rights and French lawmakers depict reason-giving as an individual human right belonging to criminal defendants, in practice, reason-giving functions as an accountability device primarily designed to solve systemic issues within the criminal justice system. More specifically, as the French case illustrates, the European interest in reason-giving can be tied to hopes for tighter control over trial judges. The chapter concludes that it is hard, if not impossible, to disentangle two facets of reason-giving, namely, reason-giving as a way to achieve fairness to defendants and reason-giving as a way to provide checks on legal actors who might otherwise enjoy unfettered discretion.

Статья посвящена анализу становления суда присяжных в Японии. Автор отмечает возросший интерес к суду присяжных как в России, так и за рубежом и рассматривает различные подходы к его организации в странах Европы, в США, России и Японии. Выделены исторические этапы развития суда присяжных в Японии начиная с XIX по XXI в. Проанализирован переход от классического суда присяжных к современной форме судебного разбирательства с участием населения, именуемой системой Saiban-in. Выявлены возможные причины отказа от классической формы суда присяжных, а также определены пути поиска новой национальной формы участия граждан в осуществлении правосудия. Вычленен промежуточный, подготовительный этап реформирования правовой системы Японии в конце XX в. Приведены нормативные источники, относящиеся к предмету исследования. Детальный анализ научной литературы и современного законодательства Японии позволил автору прийти к выводу о создании в этой стране оригинальной, смешанной формы участия граждан в осуществлении правосудия по уголовным делам. Действующая в Японии система Saiban-in свидетельствует о появлении в судебном разбирательстве новой фигуры - судебного представителя. Становление новой формы участия граждан в правосудии еще не завершено и имеет тенденцию к продолжению. Участие населения в деятельности судебной системы служит одним из основных инструментов реформирования правовой системы Японии, основной целью которого является укрепление доверия граждан к судебной системе, а также демократизация судебного разбирательства на основе принципов гласности и публичности.
Abstract. The article is devoted to the analysis of the emergence and development of
trial by jury in Japan. The author notes the increased interest to trial by jury in Russia
and abroad and describes different approaches to its organization in Europe, the USA,
Russia and Japan.
The article discusses the historical stages of the development of juries in Japan from
the 19th to the 21st century. It analyzes the historical transition from the classical trial
by jury in Japan to the modern form of trial with the participation of Japanese citizens,
which is referred to as Saiban-in.
The author describes possible reasons behind the rejection of the classical form of
trial by jury as well as the search for a new national form of citizens’ participation
in the administration of justice. The author also identifies the interim preparatory
stage for reforming Japanese legal system in the late 20th century and presents normative
sources regarding the object of the research. A detailed analysis of scientific
literature and contemporary legislation of Japan allowed the author to come to the
conclusion that this country established an original mixed form of citizens’ participation
in the administration of criminal justice. The Saiban-in system used in Japan
is a testimony to the introduction of a new figure in a court trial — that of a court
agent. The establishment of a new form of citizens’ participation in justice is not yet
complete. Citizens’ participation in the work of the court system is one of the key
instruments of legal system’s reform in Japan, whose main goal is to make citizens
trust the court system more and to democratize court trials on the principles of
openness and publicity.

The United States Supreme Court has heard oral arguments in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, No. 19-1392 (cert. granted May 17, 2021). During said arguments, by many accounts, the majority of the justices seemed to be showing their cards in favor of a pro-life ruling of some manner. This paper speculates on what pro-life litigation may look like in the future.

No ano de 2008 uma lei alterou diversos artigos do Código de Processo Penal de modo a inserir elementos considerados “acusatoriais” no procedimento criminal. A referida modificação, afetou as previsões legais sobre o funcionamento do rito do Tribunal do Júri. O presente artigo trata, então, de como tais mudanças foram incorporadas pelas práticas judiciais, a partir da observação da realização de audiências de instrução e julgamento e sessões plenárias em uma Vara do Júri da Comarca do Rio de Janeiro. Assim, descreve como as mudanças têm (ou não) sido implementadas na prática. Para tanto, trata da inquisitorialidade identificada no sistema de justiça criminal, descreve como as audiências e as sessões de julgamento têm sido conduzidas e analisa em que medida as práticas permanecem inquisitoriais.

The appeal plays a central role in the modern Canadian criminal justice system. Appellate rulings are the primary means by which, through the assessment of trial error, substantive criminal law and the law of evidence evolve and develop. Scarcely more than a century ago, however, formal criminal appeals were unknown to Anglo-Canadian criminal procedure. What provoked the creation of a criminal appellate procedure? Why and how did criminal appeals emerge in Canada at the end of the 19th century? Answers to these questions can enrich our appreciation of the essential nature and function of the modern criminal appeal.

This article examines the 19th century English debates on the establishment of a criminal appeal and places these debates in the context of the loss of the old forms of jury control in the 18th century. The author shows that the emergence of the criminal appeal was closely tied to a 19th century debate between the judges of England and members of the legal profession about the frailties of trial by jury and the need for a new means of trial error correction. The author argues that, accordingly, the modern criminal appeal is best understood as, at core, a mechanism of jury control.

This article examines two notable British trials which took place in the late Victorian period: the case of Adelaide Bartlett and the trial of Florence Maybrick. Both Adelaide and Florence were accused of having committed the murder of their own husbands by administering poison. The comparison between these two causes célèbres focuses on the role performed by three main protagonists of the judicial scene: the defence counsel, the judge and the jury. The trial of Florence Maybrick opens the door to a further comparison between the English judiciary system and the rules enacted by other countries regarding the reparation of judicial errors and the methods of review in criminal cases. As we will see in the second part of the article, on the threshold of the twentieth century, the necessity for criminal appeal was the subject of a passionate debate between traditional rules and innovative reforms.

Condorcet’s jury theorem provides a theoretical foundation for why we should put our faith in the decisions of collectives. However, it assumes that individuals vote truthfully regardless of whether they are voting in isolation or in a group setting. We present a two-stage Bayesian game in which members of the jury share a common goal of delivering justice, but may disagree over the defendant’s guilt. The jurors are rational expected utility maximisers who draw two independent signals, conveying their verdict preference and verdict certainty, and must then optimally select whether to vote truthfully or falsify their preferences in the initial vote taken by the jury. The consequences of non-unanimity in the initial vote are the jury deliberations, where jurors compete in a tournament to convince members of the opposing preference faction to vote acquiesce. We derive that the probability that all jurors vote truthfully is greater under a secret ballot in ambiguous trials that produce similarly sized preference factions, and is greater under a public vote in unambiguous cases with a clear majority faction in favour of either conviction or acquittal. We then conduct causal 2SLS estimation and empirically verify that the secret ballot increases truthful voting in ambiguous trials by 8.4%, but detect no significant effect in unambiguous trials. We overcome endogeneity concerns by instrumenting the jury’s choice over the secrecy of the initial vote with previous juror experience and whether the judge gifted the jury with notebooks for the trial, and our 2SLS estimates are robust to estimation by a two-step GMM procedure. We conclude by recommending that judges mandate the use of a secret ballot, in order to mitigate the extensive and persist societal costs associated with lying on juries.

The High Court of Ireland has recently rejected the claim that gross negligence manslaughter is an unconstitutionally vague offence.  This note will attempt to explain how the offence is undeniably vague and yet may be constitutionally acceptable by reference to legality principles. This explanation observes the unusual nature of gross negligence manslaughter as a serious offence that typically arises from lawful activity and explores the offence’s relationship with the legality principles of fair notice and restraint of arbitrary power. The note will claim, first, that fair notice is not vitiated by gross negligence manslaughter since people already know that they must avoid causing death and have no legitimate interest in causing death non-negligently or merely negligently. Second, the fact that an ad hoc constituted jury decides gross negligence manslaughter goes towards alleviating concerns about arbitrary power.

The law is axiomatic. In order to convict a person of a crime, every element of the crime with which he is charged must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. This Article argues that this fundamental proposition of American criminal law is wrong. Two types of elements are typically found in crime definitions: factual elements and moral elements. Proving factual elements involves answering questions about historical facts—that is, questions about what happened. By contrast, proving moral elements—such as “reckless,” “unjustifiable,” “without consent,” or “cruel”—involves answering questions not only about what happened but also about the evaluative significance of what happened. This Article argues that the beyond a reasonable doubt requirement should not apply to such moral elements for three reasons. First, the beyond a reasonable doubt requirement applied to normative elements compels overly underinclusive interpretations of crime definitions because the standard requires factfinders to acquit where there are reasonable moral disagreements. Second, by, in effect, thus limiting the scope of crime definitions, the requirement undermines the value of using normative terms in crime definitions as a method of guiding citizens to behave as responsible law-abiding citizens. Third, the requirement produces a situation where important normative decisions are delegated to ultimate factfinders, especially the jury, with excessively restrictive instructions as to when they are allowed to act on their moral beliefs. The Article concludes by discussing some implications of these arguments and exploring general features of criminal law that conspire to produce these problems with the beyond a reasonable doubt standard.

Con questo studio si vuole fornire una valutazione sull’attendibilità intrinseca del testimone analizzando in particolare le differenze delle strategie argomentative che le due parti processuali, accusa e difesa, utilizzano al fine di modellare il convincimento del giudice avvalendosi di specifici consulenti esperti in materia. A tal scopo, si partirà da un inquadramento teorico e giuridico della testimonianza e da un’analisi sulla letteratura in tema di memoria con particolare riferimento alla memoria autobiografica e alle memorie di eventi traumatici prendendo in considerazione le convinzioni e gli errori più diffusi tra giudici e giurati nella valutazione della credibilità del testimone.
Si mostrerà quindi come il ricordo e la testimonianza possono essere influenzati da diverse fonti di distorsione che necessitano di esser prese in considerazione in ambito forense.

This paper provides a thorough research about the practice of plea bargaining and its impact on the criminal justice system. The paper further explores both the arguments against and for the plea bargaining; that is, weighing both the advantages and disadvantages of this practice to reach a conclusion of whether or not plea bargaining is in the best interest of the criminal justice system and society. After exploring and shedding light on both arguments –the pros and cons - we can raise the question of whether or not the plea bargaining should be abolished. Furthermore, the paper it examines several research studies that focus on the hypothetical relationship between plea bargaining and its ban or abolition. In addition, it sheds light on the direct and indirect effects of this practice on the criminal justice system especially the prosecutor, defense attorney, and court procedures such as trials, caseloads, and sentencing.

The purpose of this article is to explore perceptions and assessments of lay participation in Norway during a historic time of transition away from all-layperson juries. This study consisted of sixteen months of court observation and interviews with judges, prosecutors, former lay decision makers, defense attorneys, and other contributors to the country's long-standing jury debate. My ethnographic research demonstrates that all-layperson juries in Norway face practical and procedural checks that differentiate them from Anglo-American juries, among others. For this reason, legal professionals in Norway evince confidence that mixed courts of lay and professional citizens can facilitate fair case outcomes. A central finding from this research is that comparative analyses of all-layperson juries and mixed courts require attention to the social specificity of the states that support such systems. To this end, lay participation in Norway challenges the conventional wisdom that jurors have greater independence and control over case outcomes than lay judges.

En este breve análisis del primer fallo relevante de la Corte Suprema de Justicia de la Nación
(CSJN) vinculado al funcionamiento del Juicio por Jurados, caso «Canales, Mariano y Otros s/
Homicidio agravado», se pretende repasar los antecedentes del caso, para luego observar los
agravios planteados por los recurrentes y la forma en que cada uno de estos es tratado por el
Superior Tribunal en su voto mayoritario. Asimismo, se analizará la postura del Procurador
General de la Nación y los Votos en disidencia del Dr. Rosenkrantz y Dr. Rosatti.
Luego de repasar los argumentos vertidos en el fallo y sus conclusiones, aventuraremos un
análisis sobre la función que el juicio por jurados cumple en la realidad de nuestro país a la luz
de la Constitución Nacional. Adelantándose aquí que, el fallo resulta un avance real en cuanto
al análisis de la normativa federal que concluye con la aseveración categórica de la potestad de Las Provincias para regular el instituto; pero, se queda corto en el debate de la cuestión
vinculada a las garantías procesales penales constitucionales que el jurado envuelve.

En una conferencia dictada en la universidad de Boston, a fines del siglo
XIX, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. dijo que para especializarse no había
que leer más, sino analizar los dogmas de la materia con ayuda de la
Teoría General del Derecho. También aclaró que para conocer el derecho
hay que pensar como lo haría el hombre malo, quien solo piensa en el
resultado concreto. En la actualidad, muchos abogados del siglo XXI
parecen haber olvidado la primera enseñanza y algunos sectores
académicos la segunda. Así teoría y práctica van por caminos separados.
El presente trabajo intenta mostrar la existencia de un problema
jurídico, de índole teórico y práctico que puede servir de puente entre
litigantes y teóricos: que jueces y miembros del jurado no deciden de la
misma manera. Por medio de estudios, encuestas y elementos de
psicología cognitiva se propondrán hipótesis y se rebatirán argumentos
que permitan brindar herramientas útiles para estudiantes y
profesionales. Así también las claves para comprender los cambios que
se aproximan en algunos países.

Despite being typically considered a field characterized by standardized practices and language, the genres of legal practice and profession can be object of ‘hybridization’ (Fairclough 1993). This happens, for instance, when law is recontextualized in fictional contexts, as in legal dramas, TV series staging lawyers debating cases and real legal issues in front of a judge, often involving a realistic representation of the legal system.
According to Bhatia (1997: 191) genre embedding takes place when “a particular generic form, it may be poem, a story or an article [is] used as a template to give expression to another conventionally distinct generic form” and legal dramas represent a shining example of this phenomenon, embedding a variety of legal specific genres ranging from trial phases (witness examinations, hearings, opening and closing arguments) to forms of Alternative Dispute Resolution.
This research aims at an analysis of legal drama as a ‘hybrid genre’ serving both a function of transmission of specialized knowledge and a primary entertaining function, drawing on a corpus made of three legal dramas: The Good Wife, Suits, and Boston Legal. It is conducted on the basis of Bhatia’s (2004: 119-132) suggestion that for a genre analysis it is necessary to take account of both “text-internal” and “text-external” factors.
‘Text internal’ factors analysed in legal dramas include:

1) Textual factors, represented by the description of significant lexical and grammatical aspects, e.g. recurring patterns, occurrence of technical terms associated with definitions and reformulations as strategies of popularization (see also Gülich 2003, Calsamiglia and van Dijk 2004, Garzone 2006, Gotti 2014, Anesa 2012) etc.;
2) Contextual factors, with a particular focus on the expert-lay relationship between the speakers and the way specialized contents are mediated for a non-expert audience;
3) Intertextual factors, represented by the explicit reference to other texts (e.g. quotations of regulations and of previous cases) and text embedding.

‘Text external’ factors, instead, are regarded by the focus on interdiscursivity and genre embedding (e.g. the phases of a trial) and on the representation of professional practices (mediation, arbitration, litigation, see also Bhatia, Candlin and Gotti 2010).

The massacre of the protesters and the police during the “Euromaidan” mass protests on February 18-20, 2014 in Ukraine contributed to the overthrow of the Ukrainian government and ultimately to a start of the civil war in Donbas, Russian military interventions in Crimea and Donbas, the annexation of Crimea and an international conflict between the West and Russia. However, in spite of its importance to the politics of Ukraine and global politics this mass killing have been central subject of only a couple of studies. These studies concluded that the Maidan massacre of the protesters was a false flag operation and that far right organizations were involved in the mass killing of both police and the protesters. However, the dominant narrative promoted by the governments and the media in Ukraine and the West attributed the Maidan massacre of the protesters to the government forces and mostly ignored killings of the police. The official investigation by the Prosecutor General Office of Ukraine charged Berkut special police commanders and members with the massacre of the Madian protesters on Viktor Yanukovych orders and publicly stated that Berkut policemen and Internal Troops servicemen were killed by unknown persons of unknown allegiance.

The research question is as follows: What does a large volume of various evidence made public for the first time by the Maidan massacre trials and government investigations reveal about which of the political forces were involved in this politically crucial case of mass killing? This paper analyzes more than 350 hours of video recordings of the Maidan massacre trials and information concerning investigations of this massacre in over 2,000 official court decisions in Ukraine, media interviews of prosecutors, Maidan and Berkut lawyers, and Ukrainian media reports about these trials and investigations. It examines court testimonies of wounded protesters and relatives of the killed protesters, results of forensic ballistic and medical examinations and investigative experiments, and videos and photos of the Maidan massacre shown during the trials. A video appendix includes brief relevant videos of the Maidan massacre and information from the recordings of the Maidan massacre trial. The 55 minute long online video appendix with added English-language subtitles is compiled from brief synchronized segments of on-site reports by American, Belgian, Belarusian, British, Finish, French, Dutch, German, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian TV correspondents and social media videos by various Maidan protesters who filmed this massacre on February 20, 2014.

The study finds that the Maidan massacre investigations and trials revealed a variety of evidence, such as results of forensic examinations and testimonies of many wounded protesters, which shows that at least the absolute majority of the protesters were killed and wounded from Maidan-controlled locations and that the investigation and trials were for this reason stonewalled. The analysis  shows patterns of ineffective and delayed Maidan massacre trials and the GPU investigations, trumped-up charges, and ignoring, reversing, and covering-up of the evidence, which was revealed by the GPU own investigation and which pointed to the massacre of the protesters and the police by “snipers” in the Maidan-controlled buildings and not by the Berkut police. The paper discusses implications of this study for understanding the Maidan massacre and the conflict in Ukraine and the international conflict over Ukraine.

Drawing on a second survey of lay adjudication in Europe conducted by the authors in 2011-2012, this article points to a general decline across Europe in the use of the 'traditional' jury and a trend towards diminishing its capacity to deliver independent decisions. Two examples from Eastern and Western Europe are used to illustrate this trend: a case study of the Russian jury shows how a lack of respect within the legal culture of professionals for lay adjudication has reduced the jury in Russia to a mere 'decorative' institution and an analysis of the ECtHR's jurisprudence shows how the Court's concern to avoid arbitrary decision making has been encouraging Western European states to introduce greater accountability measures, which threaten the jury's independence. The article ends on a more optimistic note by arguing that greater accountability measures need not detract from the jury' s traditional role in promoting lay and political participation in the administration of justice.

In November 1670, Chief Justice John Vaughan established, in Bushell’s Case, that jurors could no longer be judicially fined for reaching a conclusion with which the trial judge disagreed. This case has traditionally been taken as a foundational moment in the history of jury power; but in the last few decades its significance has been downplayed by legal historians, who have pointed to the continued existence of judicial control of their juries. This article, drawing on recent work on conscience as a juridical concept in early-modern England, seeks to rehabilitate Bushell’s Case, and does so by situating in within its wider discursive setting. Bushell’s Case, taken together with the concurrent pamphlet literature, offers a positive model of jury trial which downplays the jury’s relationship either with the judge’s or with the sovereign’s laws in favour of a focus on the juryman’s soul. Whatever the practical limitations of the idea, this reconceptualisation of jury trial is an important moment in the history of jury power, and one which warrants study on its own terms.

In the early twentieth century, both civil and criminal cases were resolved by trial roughly twenty percent of the time. In the early twenty-first, the trial rates for both dockets hover around two or three percent. The predominant explanation for " disappearing trial " in civil litigation is the advent of broad pretrial discovery initiated by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Trials were once necessary not only to settle factual disputes but also to generate evidence of the facts. Discovery rules empowered parties to gather virtually all evidence before trial, which turned out to lead to the parties to settle in nearly all cases and pushed the trial toward obsolescence. The federal criminal justice system never adopted discovery rules remotely as broad as the civil model. For decades, neither did state systems; most still have not. What, then, explains criminal adjudication's ability to match the civil system in replacing trials with settlements? Law enforcement has considerable evidence-gathering authority wholly separate from pretrial discovery rules, and technology provides new forms of evidence where formerly none existed. Those make up for civil discovery tools to find or create evidence. But criminal process is lacks civil procedure's other component—interparty disclosure obligations, which are crucial to facilitating settlements. And unlike civil discovery, evidence-gathering tools are provided equally to both parties. These deficiencies should undermine the criminal justice system's capacity to achieve phenomenally high rates of negotiated dispositions, yet they do not. This article makes the case that the answer lies in the distinctively coercive practices of plea-bargaining that arose in the 1980s, which soon triggered a sharp rise in guilty pleas and decline in trials. It describes how hard-bargaining tactics effectively substitute for broad discovery as a means to achieve settlements, but at a cost. While civil litigation replicates the adversarial examination of evidence in the pretrial stage that formerly occurred at trial, criminal litigation often does not, resulting in settlements that are induced by the excessive risks attached to declining them and that rest on evidence that escapes evaluation by both courts and the defense.

This paper explores recent developments on judicial directions and juror use of the internet and argues that, at the same time as it has become increasingly difficult to control the evidence a jury sees, the courts have developed strategies for more closely regulating jurors’ thoughts. Looking at these developments through the lens of Devlin’s classic theory of jury trial, it asks whether the possibility of jury nullification might be undermined by a denial of the jury’s power to respond to the case differently to the professionals involved in administering the trial.

The dock has been an iconic structure of the criminal justice system of Sri Lanka since its reception to the criminal courtroom during the British Colonial era. Making all suspects and accused of criminal cases stand in the dock during trial continues to be an unchallenged practice. This article evaluates the significance of the dock in trial courts from the perspective of a multi-disciplinary approach concerning law, criminology, psychology and architecture. It presents the arguments that the dock is not a legal requirement of a criminal trial, it violates the Constitution in terms of the rights conferred upon an accused, it cannot be supported by the criminological theory of deterrence and may instead contribute to an increase of criminality by the applicability of labeling theory, it does not consort to modern architectural concept of spatial justice and it may be detrimental to the mental wellbeing of an accused from a psychological viewpoint. Having identified the controversies inherent in the traditional construction of the dock, recommendations are made to bring in reforms to the physical structure of the dock as well as to the manner and criteria it is to be utilized in a trial to achieve a balance between interest of justice and interest of the accused.

A Lei do Feminicídio brasileira (Lei 13.104/2015) reacendeu o debate criminológico, feminista, penal, processual penal e de política criminal sobre a conveniência, necessidade e efetividade da criminalização da violência de gênero contra as mulheres mediante legislações gênero-específicas. A presente pesquisa, empírica e qualitativa, procurou interpelar algumas premissas hegemônicas nesse debate, notadamente as apriorísticas, essencialistas e dogmáticas acerca do papel da punição na vida das mulheres e da incapacidade de o sistema de justiça atendê-las, a partir da seguinte pergunta central: o que os atores jurídicos dizem sobre o feminicídio, após sua inserção no Código Penal, nos julgamentos desses casos no Tribunal do Júri? Para respondê-la, a investigação se dividiu em três eixos temáticos. O primeiro eixo procura demarcar inicialmente de onde partimos para fazer a análise das práticas jurídicas no plenário do júri. São apresentadas a genealogia da categoria do feminicídio, as razões de política criminal feminista para sua tipificação legal e uma base teórica para análise de políticas penais não apenas da perspectiva instrumental e ortodoxa de controle do crime e do criminoso, mas de suas dimensões “não-penais”. O segundo eixo analisa as práticas jurídicas a partir dos dados coletados pela observação de 5 sessões plenárias do júri (ocorridas nos meses de março e abril de 2017 no Distrito Federal). São identificadas as resistências e aproximações dos atores jurídicos com a perspectiva de gênero a partir de variáveis como uso de estereótipos de gênero, persistência de teses defensivas culpabilizadoras das vítimas, plenitude de defesa e limites éticos, (des)contextualização da violência estrutural de gênero, silenciamento quanto a marcadores interseccionais e reparação de danos e gênero ausentes nas sentenças condenatórias. O terceiro eixo analisa como as controvérsias em torno da natureza dogmático-penal da qualificadora do feminicídio repercutem na comunicação do que é o feminicídio e no seu reconhecimento pelos jurados. São apresentadas a disputa de sentidos segundo o campo jurídico (que ora classifica a qualificadora como objetiva, ora como subjetiva), a importância da visibilidade da estruturalidade da violência de gênero contra as mulheres no plano dogmáticopenal, bem como as ambiguidades em torno de categorias como “motivação de gênero” e “crime de ódio”. Por último, é analisada a associação da qualificadora com um possível aumento de punitividade tanto em termos de discursividade quanto em termos quantitativos de pena. Embora outros dados, interpretações e explicações possíveis na perspectiva de gênero pudessem ter sido explorados pelos atores jurídicos, os achados indicam uma virada, ainda que modesta, na atuação de alguns deles em relação aos apontamentos de pesquisas anteriores, com tendência aproximativa crescente da perspectiva de gênero, que só foi catalisada graças à positivação penal do feminicídio. As referências nos discursos do plenário a estatísticas de violência de gênero contra as mulheres, aos tipos de violência, à Lei Maria da Penha, ao conceito de feminicídio, ao ciclo da violência de gênero, à desigualdade de gênero e ao machismo são indicadores concretos de mudanças, ainda que pontuais. Os achados ainda sugerem que tais mudanças não se deram em razão da incorporação do gênero pela dogmática jurídica, mas em virtude do investimento das instituições jurídicas de Estado em capacitações com os profissionais responsáveis pelos casos, assim como em razão da disseminação e do acesso e uso livre de materiais e ferramentas online disponibilizadas por agências feministas como a ONU Mulheres e a Agência Patrícia Galvão. Disponível em: https://repositorio.unb.br/handle/10482/32575

The concept of legitimacy is examined (I) through a reading of Habermas’s work on communicative action, and through a reading of the opening chapters of Between Facts and Norms. The claim that legal juries function in a manner similar to a ‘parliament’ is rejected in favour of a claim that they exercise a decentred ‘particle’ of popular sovereignty. (II) An analysis of the jury’s lifeworld origins is undertaken and, (III) the essay then considers the democratic function of the operation of ‘jury equity’ whereby juries may produce ‘perverse’ decisions, or as described in the USA – jury ‘nullification’ whereby juries bring in verdicts that go against overwhelming evidence.

Monica Duarte Dantas, " O código do processo criminal e a reforma de 1841: dois modelos de organização do Estado (e suas instâncias de negociação) ". Conferência apresentada junto ao IV Congresso do Instituto Brasileiro de História do Direito – Autonomia do direito: configurações do jurídico entre a política e a sociedade, São Paulo, Faculdade de Direito/ USP, 2009 (versão para discussão).

In 2009, Japan implemented its first post-war criminal jury system, which is currently awaiting its three year review. Japanese mixed juries [saiban-in] consist of judges and lay citizens who jointly decide guilt and sentencing in serious cases by a majority vote. The Accused  may not waive the right to a jury trial; prosecutors may appeal acquittals; and jurors are precluded from ever disclosing deliberations. In previous literature, scholars have criticized the use of mixed courts, prosecutor appeals, and juror confidentiality, and have offered suggestions to basically Americanize the Japanese juries. To the contrary,  this Article explains, from a unique vantage point, that the Japanese jury system be expanded to cover additional criminal offenses; that the Accused remain prohibited from waiving the right to a jury trial; that prosecutor appeals should end; and that juror deliberations remain confidential. This Article’s most critical recommendation is that the Japanese promulgate rules requiring that lay citizen jurors deliberate and vote separately from the judges, with all votes combined to determine the majority jury vote.

This article shows that despite the infrequency of federal jury trials in the United States, jurors pervade lawyers’ work. From the earliest stages of their criminal and civil case preparation, the mere possibility that a case will proceed to trial prompts critical consideration of hypothetical jurors’ perspectives. The impact of this consideration is underappreciated by scholars who assume that a decline in the overall number of trials necessarily diminishes lay decision-makers’ value to the legal system. Without disputing this view, this article contributes much-needed nuance by examining the role that jurors play as an ethical resource for federal prosecutors. This study, which draws on five years of participatory research in a U.S. Attorney’s Office including interviews with 133 Assistant U.S. Attorneys, is the first to analyze the role of jurors in federal prosecutors’ decision-making as they evaluate and prepare evidence, witnesses, and ongoing investigations with colleagues and supervisors. It argues that the potential for juror scrutiny compels prosecutors to construct the pursuit of justice around the imperative of appealing to the common sense of an imagined public.

This document was put together for the Bristol Post in July 2020, to note the centenary of the first women acting as trial jurors in England and Wales after the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 had ended the previous ban on women serving.

Can a jury-like institution be empowered to fully represent ordinary citizens under an authoritarian regime? This article evaluates the process and significance of China’s 2015-2018 pilot project to reform its people’s assessor regime. The reform, at least nominally, was claimed to empower citizenry in two ways – to ensure that laypersons are randomly selected to represent the society in general, as well as to safeguard their meaningful role during trials and deliberation. My findings demonstrate that this recent experimentation has failed to fully empower lay participation. This failure has its roots in the twin difficulties within China’s authoritarian bureaucracy: power-sharing and political control. I support these theoretical arguments with empirical evidence obtained through surveys with people’s assessors and interview responses of Chinese judges. Overall, I claim that the institution of people’s assessors provides a double dividend of efficiency and legitimacy to the state. The path of the reform has been decisively shaped by interest-based bargaining processes among stakeholders.

The East India Company troops fighting the Burmese aggression on the frontier of Bengal in Eastern
India “freed” upper and lower Assam territories in 1825. David Scott of the Bengal Service was
appointed to oversee the establishment of civil and revenue administration in these frontier territories.
He established a hierarchical multiple structure of “native courts”—called panchayats—as the chief
medium of civil and criminal justice. This was ostensibly continuing a traditional Assamese form of
dispute resolution—the mel; however, the British criminal jury as well as the expert assessor model
animated the system. After his death in 1831, the system was brought in line with the rest of the
Bengal administration based on the British court system. His experiment, paralleled in many other
newly conquered and ceded districts from the Madras territories to Central India, suggests the use of
this mode in post-conquest situations by British administrators in South Asia.

En este trabajo expongo brevemente qué se entiende por prueba hearsay y cómo ha sido regulada en  dos sistemas de tradición jurídica anglosajona, EEUU e Inglaterra. También explico que no se trata sólo de los casos que conocemos como de “testigos de oídas”, sino que también es prueba hearsay el testimonio incorporado por lectura en el juicio.
Para comprender mejor el sentido de la regla de exclusión de la prueba hearsay, señalo algunas peculiaridades del Derecho Probatorio (Law of evidence) del proceso penal anglosajón y sus fundamentos y también  algunas de las teorías que se han formulado para explicar aquellas que clasificamos como reglas intrínsecas del derecho probatorio.
Para tener una idea más acabada del marco institucional en el que opera esta regla de prueba, analizo, siguiendo a Mirjan R. Damaška, tres aspectos característicos del particular sistema de determinación de los hechos de los sistemas anglosajones: el tribunal de juicio bifurcado, la tramitación de la prueba por las partes y los procedimientos continuos.
Finalmente, analizo críticamente la reciente regulación procesal penal de la provincia de Buenos Aires para los casos en que intervienen jurados para demostrar que se ha regulado de forma “parcial” la exclusión de la prueba hearsay. Considero que esa regulación es consecuencia, principalmente, de la particular forma de entender el principio de inmediación en sistemas procesales penales como el nuestro.
Como conclusión, señalo que cierta regulación sobre la prueba hearsay oral o “testigos de oídas” es necesaria en los casos en los que intervienen jurados, y que esa regulación debe estar de acuerdo con una interpretación razonable del derecho del imputado a confrontar a los testigos de cargo.