Another thread on the conduct of juries got me to thinking about this. I’ve only served on a jury once, but it seems to me that if I’m being asked to determine the facts of a legal case, it would be nice to be able to ask the witnesses questions, especially about things that would be clear to them, but don’t seem to come out during testimony.
As a matter of fact, in some jurisdictions, the jury * can * ask questions.
I found this out when I was watching a trial once, and a juror just upped and asked a question, and much to my surprise, the judge allowed it. This was in Missouri.
I get the feeling it’s one of those things that the jury can do, but the lawyers and judges don’t really like them to do it, so they don’t call much attention to it.
Hmmmm… I wonder if jurors could, and that just wasn’t pointed out to us. It’s also possible that I forgot about any instructions related to asking questions, but I don’t think I did.
Any lawyers out there with ideas about this?
In California, when I was empaneled on a jury, the judge told us that we couldn’t ask questions during the trial. If we had a question of any kind, we had to write it out and the judge and the attorneys would confer on it. They could opt to answer it or say that an answer wouldn’t be proper at that time.
I started a thread to ask whether jurors could ask questions (and some other issues). Right of jurors and uncalled witnesses to speak out at trials Arnold’s link provided a lot of answers.
I was told not to take notes.
I’ll have to remember this issue when I respond to people who think there are no differences from state to state in this country any more…
To get back to the OP, there is a very fundamental reason why the jury can’t ask questions, as well as an historical reason.
The fundamental reason that juries don’t ask questions is because they aren’t investigating the case. Our system of jurisprudence is an adversarial system, before a neutral arbiter. Compare to this the system in a country like France, where the judge has the duties of investigating the case, to make a proper determination. In English jurisprudential systems (especially as developed in America), each side to the case has the duty to present their version of the facts and law, in an attempt to convince the neutral arbiter of the correctness of their position. The assumption is that, in the conflict between the sides, each with a need to win, the truth will emerge. In addition, since each side is controlling what they wish to present (within limits established by law), a wider set of available evidence will be presented than if the arbiter does the investigating and controlling.
Since the jury is the neutral arbiter of the facts (e.g., was the car red or green?), it remains quiet, charged with the job of carefully taking in all the evidence, without making its mind up about what it is seeing until it gets to the deliberation phase. As one can read at the following link provided in the thread mentioned above, jury improvement suggestions (please read the information here with some skepticism only because they are advocates for change, and aren’t necessarily very unbiased in presentation of their information), one of the main reasons most jurisdictions either bar questioning by the jury, or discourage it, is that there is worry that the jury’s neutral status would evaporate, the jury in essence using the right to quesiton witnesses to begin to make their case to other jurors (in much the same way that we heard Justice Ginsburg making the case to Justice O’Connor in the recent tape of the Supreme Court hearing on the Florida Supreme Court decision). To some extent, this really comes down to conservative reliance on traditional procedures versus liberal attempts to revamp the system to make it work better.
The historical reason for juries being silent has to do with the development of the jury trial. In pre-Norman England, freemen of a shire were required to attend certain meetings, or ‘moots’, such as the county court, or the court of a hundred. Such courts gave decisions on business before the meeting, including judgements over civil disputes. After the Normans took over, they brought with them an idea that appears to have its genesis with Charles the Great (known usually as Charlemagne). The Normans used groups of citizens to delve into matters concerning the rights of local citizens vis-a-vis the crown. This was mutated during the reign of Henry II to allow the beginnings of what we now call a Grand Jury: twelve men were required to investigate and present to the justices at county court sessions (which were held when the justices, officers of the court, rode their circuit of counties) the names of those the jury suspected of committing crimes. By late in the reign of his son, Richard Coeur de Lion, the lesser, or ‘petite’ jury began hearing the evidence in criminal matters. This type of jury had begun deciding civil cases during Henry’s reign. By the time of Henry III (about 1220), criminal juries began being substituted for trial by ordeal.
Initially, juries decided a matter on the basis of what they themselves knew to be ‘true’ about the accused, or the civil litigants. There was no presentation of evidence in the manner to which we are accustomed. This obviously causes trouble if the accused or one of the civil parties is disliked in his community. Eventually, by the time of the accession of William III and Mary II in the Glorious Revolution, juries had become sifters of evidence presented to them, and judges had the option of rejecting a verdict if it was not in accordance with the law or the facts in civil cases (for an interesting read, look up the ‘attaint jury’).
Thus, if you will, juries today are silent, because juries in the past were allowed to speak, and it was determined to be an undesirable thing.
Information for this response has been culled from various sources, including Compton’s Encyclopedia Online, the Encyclopedia Brittanica, the opinion of Justice Burger in Richmond Newspapers, Inc. v. Virginia, 448 U.S. 555 (1980), among others.
I can’t add anything to DSYoungEsq’s answer except that grand jury members are allowed to ask questions;however, grand juries aren’t empanelled to decide the guilt or innoncence of the accused, but to decide if the State has enough evidence or cause to proceed with the matter. Is it a true bill of indictment or not? In that case, it helps to have grand jurors ask questions.
DSYoungEsq: You are so cool! 
Thanks!
I served on a civil jury in California, and I did ask a question. We were told that if we had questions, we could submit them in writing to the judge and he would determine whether they were appropriate. I was extremely frustrated that neither lawyer had asked a particular witness a question that I considered to be crucial to an understanding of his testimony, so I asked it myself. After much conferring among the attorneys and the judge, they determined that the witness could answer my question.
The answer was “no”.
DSYoungEsq’s post gives the history of the jury’s investigative ability. But in my opinion, the real reason for non-investigative juries is because of the adversarial system. The prosecution and the defense both have a specific goal they are trying to achieve, and at least one of them is required to do so in the face of the facts. So in order to reach their goal, they want to control how the evidence is presented. An investigative jury would be a wild card, the actions of which neither side could anticipate. So the court system is set up, under procedures created by legal professionals, to minimize any interference from anyone who isn’t a legal professional.
Actually, the ultimate wild card isn’t an investigative jury. The ultimate wild cards are the juries themselves. 12 random people (all right, so in the end they’re not really random, but whatever) with very little to no legal experience, almost no previous knowledge of the case, and completely at the mercy of whatever information is deemed acceptable to be presented are there to decide the fate of the defendant(s).
How much wilder can we possibly make the system?
My belief is that, in order to lessen the “wildness,” juries should be allowed to ask questions. Take a case of one party suing another over negligence. Both sides present their case. Neither side has to be lying and yet they can use the same facts to advance their particular theory. In the case of negligence, it’s often a matter of both parties being at fault to some degree. The jury must decide whether the defendant was more culpable and by how much. Asking questions in this instance would greatly help determine this.
Both sides seek the truth…but only their truth. This isn’t wrong, it’s just the way it is. But it’s always been the case that the courts are ultimately seeking THE truth. Guilty doesn’t mean he did it and Not Guiltly doesn’t mean innocent. We’re going to get screw ups like this because the system is imperfect and imperfect people are working with imperfect information from far from perfect sources.
Juries, the wild card, should be unbiased. They should, above all else, be the ones seeking THE truth. It’s out there, somewhere between the two sides. If we trust the juries enough to render an unbiased opinion, why can’t we also trust them enough to ask an unbiased question?
Sorry if this is more of a GD answer than GQ.
This is true, but for a less sinister reason than you might think. One of the reasons that courts tend to restrict jury questioning is because the jury doesn’t have the full view of the case and issues. There are many rules on what evidence can be presented, etc. These are legal issues that have developed for good reason over time. The risk with allowing unfettered questioning from the jury is that they might ask questions that are not considered legally relevant to the trial. That’s why SpoilerVirgin had to submit the question to the judge before asking. Basically, the courts don’t want a juror asking a forcible rape victim how many men she’s slept with.