Essay Response: A Jury of our Fears

            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
            
             the use of expert jury consultants.
            
             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
            
             some areas.
            
             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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Essay Response: A Jury of our Fears. (2009, July 16). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 09:47, September 15, 2025, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/202886.html