[lbo-talk] jury duty

Wendy Lyon wendy.lyon at gmail.com
Wed May 17 07:25:34 PDT 2006


On 5/17/06, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> It Europe the civil codes don't even provide for
> juries in lots of cases -- most civil cases, for
> example -- and judges have a much more central role. A
> Belgian lawyer told me that in Belgian criminal cases
> juries ere available only for murder trials, of which
> they have about five a year over there.

In Ireland (north and south) there are non-jury trials for "scheduled offences". These courts were originally set up to deal with cases arising from the conflict in this country, but lately the southern state, at least, has been using them for gangland/drug related trials as well. At the time they were set up, the justification was to prevent juror intimidation, although no cases of juror intimidation were ever demonstrated (witness demonstration yes, but that's obviously something that can happen with or without a jury).

As you'd expect, the conviction rate in these courts is pretty high.



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