Juries Quotes

“Nine of us now seem to feel that the defendant is innocent, but we're just gambling on probabilities. We may be wrong. We may be trying to return a guilty man to the community. No one can really know. But we have a reasonable doubt, and this is a safeguard that has enormous value in our system. No jury can declare a man guilty unless it's sure. We nine can't understand how you three are still so sure. Maybe you can tell us.”
― Reginald Rose, Twelve Angry Men

“All my instincts are one way, and all the facts are the other, and I much fear that British juries have not yet attained that pitch of intelligence when they will give the preference to my theories over Lestrade's facts.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Norwood Builder - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story

“The law is logical and is based on common sense. The trick was to argue the law in favor of your particular point of view without sounding biased. It was kind of like a magic trick: the best illusionist being the one who can best manipulate the logic to his or her advantage, all the while giving the illusion of impartiality.”
― Kenneth G. Eade, A Patriot's Act

“I pretended I had urgent business at the prosecutor's table which, in one of The System's obvious tells, was always millimeters from the jury box.”
― Sergio De La Pava, A Naked Singularity

“Studying the rule of law won't make a great litigator. It is the act of trying cases in real courtrooms with real plaintiffs and defendants and judges and juries, week after week and year after year that develops lawyers into top trial attorneys.”
― Marian Deegan

“When a serious felony case went to trial in a county like Monroe County, which was 40 percent black, it was not uncommon for prosecutors to exclude all African Americans from jury service. In fact, twenty years after the civil rights revolution, the jury remained an institution largely unchanged by the legal requirements of racial integration and diversity. As far back as the 1880s, the Supreme Court ruled in Strauder v. West Virginia that excluding black people from jury service was unconstitutional, but juries remained all-white for decades afterward. In 1945, the Supreme Court upheld a Texas statute that limited the number of black jurors to exactly one per case. In Deep South states, jury rolls were pulled from voting rolls, which excluded African Americans. After the Voting Rights Act passed, court clerks and judges still kept the jury rolls mostly white through various tactics designed to undermine the law. Local jury commissions used statutory requirements that jurors be "intelligent and upright" to exclude African Americans and women.

In the 1970s, the Supreme Court ruled that underrepresentation of racial minorities and women in jury pools was unconstitutional, which in some communities at least led to black people being summoned to the courthouse for possible selection as jurors (if not selected). The Court had repeatedly made clear, though, that the Constitution does not require that racial minorities and women actually serve on juries—it only forbids excluding jurors on the basis of race or gender.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“Studying the rule of law won't make a great litigator. It is the act of trying cases in real courtrooms with real plaintiffs and defendants and judges and juries, week after week and year after year that develops lawyers into top trial attorneys.
― Marian Deegan”
― Marian Deegan, Relevance: Matter More

“It was ridiculous to think that twelve people could “turn off’ all their biases and prejudices and make a logical decision based on the evidence they were allowed to hear in the trial.”
― Kenneth G. Eade, HOA Wire

“Sometimes you had a better shot with a jury, that body of ones “peers” who make decisions with their emotional brains; especially if your client was guilty.”
― Kenneth G. Eade, HOA Wire

“Even though the Judge would charge the jury that they should listen to all the evidence before they made up their minds, the chances were likely that 100% of them will have already decided if William was guilty or not before the trial was over.”
― Kenneth Eade, Unreasonable Force

“You never know with juries. I’d take a judge every time, unless of course I was guilty.”
― Kenneth Eade, Unreasonable Force

“Now they will go back to their lives. Some will curse us, some will look forward to serve, and others will look to us for entertainment. We will not disappoint any of them, Brent. They don’t need us, but we surely need them.”
― Kenneth Eade, The Spy Files

“I was coming to understand that trials are a contest of stories. Basically, there are two opposing stories, very different from each other, that are in effect two artefacts obtained by combining the same elements—the mythemes—in different ways. Don’t hire a lawyer, hire a good writer. Because it’s not the truth that will win, but the person who tells the best story, the most coherent and believable one. In other words, the most mythological story, the one best able to fit the world view of the jurors.”
― Katixa Agirre, Las madres no