Opinion ID: 1401773
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: peremptory challenges in english courts.

Text: The notion of a jury as the arbiter of disputes is of ancient origin, probably originating with the Athenian dikasteria. See generally Lloyd E. Moore, The Jury: Tool of Kings, Palladium of Liberty 2, 4-8 (2d ed. Anderson 1988). The concept of peremptory challenges is generally traced to Roman senatorial trials that originated in the pre-Christian era. Each year, the Senate chose eighty-one of its members to serve as prospective jurors. Each litigant could challenge fifteen, leaving a jury of fifty-one. Id. at 3. The concept of trial by jury probably did not exist in England prior to the Norman Conquest of 1066 and is generally thought to have its Norman/English origins in Charlemagne's inquisitio. Id. at 13-19 (citing Heinrich Brunner, The Origin of Juries (Berlin 1872)). Prior to the Conquest, the three basic trial methods in England were trial by compurgation, [8] trial by combat, [9] and, most often in felony cases, trial by ordeal. [10] In 1166, exactly 100 years after the Conquest, Henry II proclaimed the Assize of Clarendon, banning trials by compurgation and establishing a uniform system of juries to resolve civil and minor criminal disputes; felonies continued to be tried primarily by ordeal. Moore, supra, at 35-39; John A. Proffatt, A Treatise on Trial By Jury, Including Questions of Law and Fact §§ 25-26, at 37-39 (Riverside 1880). Chapter XXXIX of the Magna Carta, [11] signed in 1215, has been attributed as the source of the right to a trial by a jury of twelve peers. Thompson v. Utah, 170 U.S. 343, 349, 18 S.Ct. 620, 622, 42 L.Ed. 1061 (1898), overruled on other grounds by Collins v. Youngblood, 497 U.S. 37, 51-52, 110 S.Ct. 2715, 2724, 111 L.Ed.2d 30 (1990); 4 Blackstone, supra note 8, at 342-43. However, that theory has largely been rejected by modern scholars. See, e.g., J.C. Holt, Magna Carta 327 (1965); Felix Frankfurter & Thomas G. Corcoran, Petty Federal Offenses and the Constitutional Guaranty of Trial by Jury, 39 Harv. L.Rev. 917, 922 & n. 14 (1926) (debunking the attribution in Thompson as one of the most revered of legal fables). Pope Innocent III's ban on trials by ordeal, proclaimed at the Fourth Lateran Council (also in 1215), is regarded as more decisive to the increased employment of jury trials, Theodore F.T. Plucknett, A Concise History of the Common Law 118-19 (5th ed.1956), because the abolition of the ordeal left trial by jury as the only logical alternative to deciding serious criminal cases. Morris B. Hoffman, Peremptory Challenges Should Be Abolished: A Trial Judge's Perspective, 64 U. Chi. L.Rev. 809, 818-19 (1997). By 1220, trial by jury had become the primary method for determining a defendant's guilt in serious criminal cases. Thomas A. Green, Verdict According to Conscience 3 (1985). The jurors, both grand and petit, were most often knights selected by the King's judiciary. Moore, supra, at 50, 53-54. As jury trials flourished in the thirteenth century, the concept of the peremptory challengeat least for the prosecutionbegan to take root, particularly in capital cases. [12] Either party could challenge a juror for cause because of a relationship to a litigant by blood, marriage, or economic interest. Jon M. Van Dyke, Jury Selection Procedures: Our Uncertain Commitment to Representative Panels 141 (1977). In addition, the Crown could effectively exercise an unlimited number of challenges without explanation simply on the basis of royal infallibility, i.e., the challenges were irrebuttably presumed to be for a proper purpose. Id. at 148. Thus, Judge Hoffman posits that this early English peremptory challenge was more of a hybrid between a peremptory and a challenge for cause. Hoffman, Peremptory Challenges Should Be Abolished, supra, at 820-21. In response, some courts began to permit criminal defendants in capital cases to exercise peremptory challenges. By the end of the thirteenth century, it was well settled in the common law that the Crown could exercise an unlimited number of peremptory challenges and the accused could exercise thirty-five. Proffatt, supra, § 155, at 207-08. In 1305, Parliament enacted the Ordinance for Inquests, 33 Edw. 1, Stat. 4, in an attempt to restrict the Crown's power not only to handpick all prospective jurors but also to exercise unlimited peremptory challenges. The Ordinance abolished the Crown's peremptory challenges while establishing by law the accused's right to peremptorily challenge thirty-five jurors. 4 Blackstone, supra note 8, at 346-48. The King's courts, however, largely avoided the elimination of the prosecution's peremptory challenges by recognizing a new common law procedure known as standing aside. By this device, the prosecutor could direct any number of prospective jurors to stand aside until each side had exercised all challenges for cause and the accused had exercised all of his or her peremptory challenges. Only if the number of jurors then remaining were insufficient could the jurors standing aside be recalled, subject, of course, to challenges for cause. Proffatt, supra, §§ 159-160, at 211-13. After 1305, the number of peremptory challenges allotted to defendants in English criminal trials was gradually reduced from thirty-five to twenty [13] (22 Hen. 8, ch. 14, § 6 (1530); 6 Geo. 4, ch. 50, § 29 (1825)); then to seven (11 & 12 Geo. 6, ch. 58, § 35 (1948)); then to three (The Criminal Law Act, 1977, ch. 45, § 43); until they were finally abolished, along with the standing aside procedure, effective January 5, 1989 (The Criminal Justice Act, 1988, ch. 33, § 118(1)). [14]