The Jury May Be Out Permanently

One of our principal safeguards of justice is the historic right to trial by jury. Today, says the author, widespread resistance to jury duty delays the courts and is bringing the system under attack

You can blame it on such people as the young mother from Bedford, Indiana. As a member of a jury panel recently, she voted to convict a man of rape although she believed him innocent. She voted against her own judgment, she said, because, “I knew I had those children at home and we would never get out of there if we tried to argue it out with the others.” The man was sentenced to life imprisonment.