In A Jury of Our Fears, Judge Harold J. Rothwax argues convincingly that the
American jury system is plagued with several serious problems. Chief among them,
compulsory jury service enforcement, the incomprehensible requirement in almost every
state and the federal court system for unanimous jury verdicts, despite not being required
by the Constitution; and the corruption of peremptory challenges in jury selection through
Rothwax explains that compulsory jury service is not a particularly effective
means of establishing jury pools, partly because the juror summons is largely unenforced
and partly because it relies on methods that ignore large segments of the population.
Since most jurisdictions rely on voting registration lists to establish their jury pools, it
automatically ignores most nonvoters, which may be a very substantial percentage in
The fact that compliance with juror summonses are almost entirely unenforced
means that many of the most intelligent and educated potential jurors eliminate
themselves from consideration by ignoring the summons, while a much higher
percentage of the less educated and politically savvy respond out of fear of the illusory
consequences of shirking their civic responsibility. One of the solutions suggested by
Rothwax is to expand the pool of potential jurors by adding drivers license registration to
include many nonvoters. Now, over a decade after Rothwax wrote the essay, the
integration of computers into society would make it even easier than the author
envisioned to implement that particular method of addressing this criticism.
Rothwax points to the requirement in all but two of fifty states for unanimous jury
verdicts. According to the author, requiring unanimity is a prescription for obtaining
verdicts by peer pressure and intimidation anytime a jury i
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