Forensics Journal - Stevenson University 2010 | Page 20

STEVENSON UNIVERSITY

The Future of the American Petit Jury System
A Look at the Problems in the American Jury System and the Use
of Professional Juries
Lauren Maxwell
Within the American judicial system, justice is intended to be the
single most important and steadfast principle, and it is expected to
withstand the pressure of all human ills and evils. Within that structure of justice, criminal defendants are constitutionally guaranteed
the right to have a panel of their “peers” determine their innocence
or guilt with regard to the commission of a crime. Unfortunately, the
number of innocent people who have wrongly been convicted under
the current system is alarming; instead of the members of a jury acting as the final safeguard to ensure that an innocent person’s freedom
is not erroneously taken away, a jury’s decision is often the final
step in guaranteeing that someone who has wrongly been accused
of a crime has essentially lost all ability to prove his innocence. The
American petit jury system is broken, and the very people the system
is designed to protect are the ones who are paying the price. The time
has come for Americans to consider adopting a system of paid, professional jurors in order to ensure that the fairness and liberties guaranteed to all citizens are distributed and applied as equally as possible.

without stating the cause for dismissal. In Batson v. Kentucky, the
United States Supreme Court handed down a decision that an attorney could not use peremptory challenges to dismiss jurors solely on
the basis of race (476 U.S. 79 (1986)). Since an attorney need not
state the reason for a peremptory challenge, this standard is difficult
to uphold. The Batson decision has made the “science” of jury selection even more imperfect, and has caused race to be seen more as a
card to play within the system than simply the human characteristic
of skin color.
With prosecutors now depending on more sophisticated types of
evidence—such as deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), physics-based blood
spatter analysis and forensics, computer-based crime scene re-enactments, and other complicated advances in science and biology—to
obtain convictions, the need for jurors to be able to separate, analyze,
and arrive at accurate conclusions based on the evidence presented
at trial is becoming arguably more demanding and difficult for the
lay juror. DNA has essentially replaced the fingerprint as the primary
type of evidence that is used to prove guilt beyond a reasonable
doubt, and its consistent appearance in the media has considerably
heightened the public’s expectation of its appearance at trials. This
is not necessarily a bad thing, as DNA evidence helps to reduce the
number of innocent people who are convicted by witn \