From The Crime Report:
Down deep at the taproot of the Anglo-American tradition lies the idea that the state’s monopoly on violence—its power to incarcerate citizens by force—can only be exercised after approval by a diverse jury of ordinary citizens, with each juror convinced beyond a reasonable doubt of a set of facts that justifies the action.
Jury trials were a foundational concept for the Founders of the Republic. John Adams believed that the jury trial and representative government were “the heart and lungs of liberty.”
Thomas Jefferson thought so too. “I consider the trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution,” he wrote in a letter to Thomas Paine. Continue reading >>>
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