For the average citizen, trying to make sense of legal jargon is akin to reading a foreign language. Latin phrases and an elitist vocabulary are sprinkled copiously atop a backdrop of semantics that needs to be picked apart piece by piece. The documents are anything but straightforward and speak entirely in the language of loopholes. The hearings are intricate webs of questions that circumvent the task at hand and delve into ambiguities. Yet the average American citizen is called to exercise his or her so-called “civic responsibility” in performing jury duty. No wonder a lot of people avoid it like rabies.
After watching television shows such as Texas Justice and Judge Judy, as well as devouring books with poignant and invigorating court scenes, jurors’ expectations are cast indefinitely into oblivion as they find themselves stuck in a labyrinth of carefully chosen, incomprehensible questions asked in an even more carefully chosen, incomprehensible lingo. They end up a great deal further from Lifetime Television courtroom dramas than they had ever hoped to be.
In a measure to improve jurors’ understanding of the law, the specific trial and the evidence, the Colorado Supreme Court will be considering the contentions of not only attorneys and jurors, but also of the general public to decide whether or not jurors should be permitted to ask questions during criminal suits.
An option such as this may very well “give jurors the tools to get the job done,” as proposed by the Center for Jury Studies at the National Center for State Courts’ director Tom Munsterham, but it may also cheapen the legal system and — as members of the Supreme Court rules committee fear — “lessen the prosecution’s burden to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
With all the dread of a colonoscopy, jurors in criminal trials anticipate days to weeks of hearings without a chance to speak. For more than five years now in Arizona, however, judges have considered the questions of jurors so long as they are within the realms and guidelines of the legal process. But then again, is it not the prosecution’s job to question witnesses and to assure the court of the defendant’s guilt, not the jury’s?
In the American idea of a court of peers, Adams County District Attorney Bob Grant feels that the legal system has adopted “an elitist idea” by asserting that “the only ones who can talk in court are lawyers.”
But in the matter of criminal hearings, the decisions can be life or death — the death penalty is sometimes an option and life behind bars is the end of any life as we known it. If Grant’s allegation is indeed appropriate, then one can argue that doctors are arrogant, self-important elitists if they think they are the only ones who can perform surgery or provide medical attention. The fact of the matter is that, like doctors, lawyers are trained to do what they do; their schooling affords them the ability and privilege of appealing to a judge and to a jury.
Attorneys are not blind to the capabilities and mindsets of the average juror and working within (or above) these boundaries is all in a day’s work. Giving jurors the privilege of submitting questions to the judge, who would in turn ask them of witnesses, undermines the lawyers’ profession and detracts from their training. Therefore, the standard procedure should be upheld — leave the cheapening of the legal system to Judge Judy.