I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races: that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.
— Abraham Lincoln
Satisfaction Jurors quotations
I have carefully examined the evidences of the Christian religion, and if I was sitting as a juror upon its authenticity I would unhesitatingly give my verdict in its favor. I can prove its truth as clearly as any proposition ever submitted to the mind of man.
A right to jury trial is granted to criminal defendants in order to prevent oppression by the Government.
Some people try to get out of jury duty by lying.
You don't have to lie. Tell the judge the truth. Tell him you'd make a terrific juror because you can spot guilty people.
I am not in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office.
Trial. A formal inquiry designed to prove and put upon record the blameless characters of judges, advocates and jurors.
The trial by jury is a trial by 'the country,' in contradistinction to a trial by the government. The jurors are drawn by lot from the mass of the people, for the very purpose of having all classes of minds and feelings, that prevail among the people at large, represented in the jury.
The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.
It is not only the juror's right, but his duty to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment and conscience, though in direct opposition to the instruction of the court.
If a juror feels that the statute involved in any criminal offence is unfair, or that it infringes upon the defendant's natural god-given unalienable or constitutional rights, then it is his duty to affirm that the offending statute is really no law at all and that the violation of it is no crime at all, for no one is bound to obey an unjust law.
I did not see any major issues other than the jury substitutions.
I can't know whether there's a problem there, until I read the transcript from the in-chambers conference, when those jurors were excused.
The grand solid merit of jury trial is that the jurors .
.. are selected at the last moment from the multitude of citizens. They cannot be known beforehand, and they melt back into the multitiude after each trial.
Currently, we're finding that about 75 percent of potential jurors have anger or deep-seated hatred toward anyone associated with Enron.
Jurors want courtroom lawyers to have some compassion and be nice.
Jurors realize that instead of having to make that terrible decision (voting for the death penalty), they can vote to put someone in prison and ensure that defendant is no longer a harm to society. It makes it easier for them to return a verdict of life without the possibility of parole.
The major networks, the cable networks, they're being prosecutors.
They're judges and jurors and executioners. Well, c'mon, that's ridiculous. But they're doing it.
It would be an absurdity for jurors to be required to accept the judge's view of the law, against their own opinion, judgment, and conscience.
Global warming ... may be a plaintiff lawyer's dream. And it's interesting, in a perverse way, to imagine how a jury in 2050 might react to some of the recent industry-backed studies minimizing the dangers of global warming. I suspect future jurors will not be amused.
The time has come for professional jurors.
To vest a few fallible men — prosecutors, judges, jurors — with vast powers of literary or artistic censorship, to convert them into what J. S. Mill called a "moral police," is to make them despotic arbiters of literary products. If one day they ban mediocre books as obscene, another day they may do likewise to a work of genius.
The kind of evidence that was put before the jurors led to less-than-rational decision-making. I think that juries are composed of good people who can be misled.
Jurors should acquit, even against the judge's instruction .
. . if exercising their judgment with discretion and honesty they have a clear conviction the charge of the court is wrong.
Look at the Chandra Levy case. It's become a Star Chamber. The major networks, the cable networks, they're being prosecutors. They're judges and jurors and executioners. Well, c'mon, that's ridiculous. But they're doing it.
He maintained that the case was lost or won by the time the final juror had been sworn in; his summation was set in his mind before the first witness was called. It was all in the orchestration, he claimed: in knowing how and where to pitch each and every particular argument; who to intimidate; who to trust, who to flatter and court; who to challenge; when to underplay and exactly when to let out all the stops.
To exclude all jurors who would be in the slightest way affected by the prospect of the death penalty would be to deprive the defendant of the impartial jury to which he or she is entitled under the law.
Black jurors sit on juries every day and convict black people every day.
On a certain level, we don't try enough cases.
We should try more cases before juries and let jurors decide. On grand juries, my position is the grand jury should be eliminated, but there are creative ways a lawyer can use a grand jury if they have a client with a sympathetic cause who has been wronged by the police.
Howard Zinn ran what is called the Zinn Education Project.
It is a radical, radical bunch of insane lunatic leftists. And there is a project at the Zinn Educational Project: A People's History of Muslims in the United States - What School Textbooks and the Media Miss. And this program is teaching your high school student, juror junior high or middle school student.
Because jurors have an extraordinary amount of power over the situation and of the people and the story in front of them, they tend to pay pretty intense attention to what's happening.
Physicians ought not to give their judgment of religion, for the same reason that butchers are not admitted to be jurors upon life and death.
Since natural law was thought to be accessible to the ordinary man, the theory invited each juror to inquire for himself whether a particular rule of law was consonant with principles of higher law. This view is reflected in John Adams' statement that it would be an 'absurdity' for jurors to be required to accept the judge's view of the law, 'against their own opinion, judgment, and conscience.'
A lawyer once told a jury that the person his client stood accused of having killed was about to walk through the courtroom door. When the jurors looked startled, the lawyer asserted that if those jurors had wondered, even for one second that the victim might appear, that belief constituted enough reasonable doubt for them to find his client innocent.
Students are not to read the Bible, jurors are not to hear it, prosecutors cannot quote from it, and teachers are not to display it.
Evidence of defendants' lavish lifestyles is often used to provide a motive for fraud. Jurors sometimes wonder why an executive making tens of millions of dollars would cheat to make even more. Evidence of habitual gluttony helps provide the answer.
The humorist who invented trial by jury played a colossal practical joke upon the world, but since we have the system we ought to try and respect it. A thing which is not thoroughly easy to do, when we reflect that by command of the law a criminal juror must be an intellectual vacuum, attached to a melting heart and perfectly macaronian bowels of compassion.