Quotes About Jurors

#1. Look at the Chandra Levy case. It's become a Star Chamber. The major networks, the cable networks, they're being prosecutors. They're judges and jurors and executioners. Well, c'mon, that's ridiculous. But they're doing it.

Ray Bradbury

#2. Abraham Lincoln would maintain that he had never been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#3. Students are not to read the Bible, jurors are not to hear it, prosecutors cannot quote from it, and teachers are not to display it.

Ralph E. Reed Jr.

#4. Currently, we're finding that about 75 percent of potential jurors have anger or deep-seated hatred toward anyone associated with Enron.

Michael Ramsey

#5. The grand solid merit of jury trial is that the jurors ... are selected at the last moment from the multitude of citizens. They cannot be known beforehand, and they melt back into the multitiude after each trial.

John Henry Wigmore

#6. 'Twelve Angry Men' was done with an intermission, and I took that out. I really wanted an audience to feel like they had no break, just like those jurors, and you're not going to get out of that room until you come to a decision.

Scott Ellis

#7. To exclude all jurors who would be in the slightest way affected by the prospect of the death penalty would be to deprive the defendant of the impartial jury to which he or she is entitled under the law.

Byron White

#8. Maupassant is a man of mitigating circumstances, the lawyer who can bring the jurors around by demonstrating that they too could have committed such a crime. We are all murderers.

Philippe Lejeune

#9. I am not in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office.

Abraham Lincoln

#10. Legislators and judges are necessarily exposed to all the temptations of money, fame, and power, to induce them to disregard justice between parties, and sell the rights, and violate the liberties of the people. Jurors, on the other hand, are exposed to none of these temptations.

Lysander Spooner

#11. The time has come for professional jurors.

Joseph Wambaugh

#12. [Jurors who are opposed to capital punishment are] more likely to believe that a defendant's failure to testify is indicative of his guilt, more hostile to the insanity defense, more mistrustful of defense attorneys and less concerned about the danger of erroneous convictions.

Thurgood Marshall

#13. I now see that it is possible that I can receive a fair trial even with Americans as jurors,

Zacarias Moussaoui

#14. Trial. A formal inquiry designed to prove and put upon record the blameless characters of judges, advocates and jurors.

Ambrose Bierce

#15. I did not see any major issues other than the jury substitutions. I can't know whether there's a problem there, until I read the transcript from the in-chambers conference, when those jurors were excused.

Catherine Crier

#16. I approached writing a story for the CBC Literary Awards as a mercenary venture - $5,000 for one story, not bad. Now, how do you win it? Jurors are wading through skyscrapers of paper, looking for one story that stands out.

Michael Winter

#17. Evidence of defendants' lavish lifestyles is often used to provide a motive for fraud. Jurors sometimes wonder why an executive making tens of millions of dollars would cheat to make even more. Evidence of habitual gluttony helps provide the answer.

Alex Berenson

#18. One point is certain, that truth is one and immutable; until the jurors all agree, they cannot all be right.

Washington Irving

#19. [N]o American should retreat an inch on the right of jurors to acquit if they perceive the law or its administration to be unjust.

Charley Reese

#20. The kind of evidence that was put before the jurors led to less-than-rational decision-making. I think that juries are composed of good people who can be misled.

Kenneth C. Frazier

#21. Physicians ought not to give their judgment of religion, for the same reason that butchers are not admitted to be jurors upon life and death.

Jonathan Swift

#22. A Seattle lawyer once interrupted his lengthy cross-examination of a witness and exclaimed, "Your Honor, one of the jurors is asleep." "You put him to sleep," replied the judge. "Suppose you wake him up."

James Keller

#23. The trial by jury is a trial by 'the country,' in contradistinction to a trial by the government. The jurors are drawn by lot from the mass of the people, for the very purpose of having all classes of minds and feelings, that prevail among the people at large, represented in the jury.

Lysander Spooner

#24. Black jurors sit on juries every day and convict black people every day.

Johnnie Cochran

#25. The jurors appear vaguely stranded and at loose ends, uprooted from their routines and livelihoods.

Walter Kirn

#26. Jurors should acquit, even against the judge's instruction ... if exercising their judgment with discretion and honesty they have a clear conviction the charge of the court is wrong.

Alexander Hamilton

#27. In court, jurors are admonished by the judge at every recess not to discuss the case or form any opinions until the case is given to them for deliberations. Of course, there is no such limitation on the public.

Robert Shapiro

#28. As long as we can get redress in the courts, as long as the laws shall be honestly administered, as long as honesty and intelligence sit upon the bench, as long as intelligence sits in the chairs of jurors, this country will stand, the law will be enforced, and the law will be respected.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#29. Jurors want courtroom lawyers to have some compassion and be nice.

Johnnie Cochran

#30. Global warming ... may be a plaintiff lawyer's dream. And it's interesting, in a perverse way, to imagine how a jury in 2050 might react to some of the recent industry-backed studies minimizing the dangers of global warming. I suspect future jurors will not be amused.

David Ignatius

#31. During my jury selection process, we went through over 360 jurors. It took six months, all New York residents. Of the 360 jurors, over half of them had been mugged one time. Quite a number of them, maybe 30 40, 50, had been mugged twice.

Bernhard Goetz

#32. It seems that in Baltimore, one of the most violent cities in America, jurors are far more reluctant to convict criminal defendants than in the suburban enclaves that ring the city.

David Simon

#33. It would be an absurdity for jurors to be required to accept the judge's view of the law, against their own opinion, judgment, and conscience.

John Adams

#34. May your wife and children get raped, right in the ass. (to the jurors who convicted her)

Aileen Wuornos

#35. Because jurors have an extraordinary amount of power over the situation and of the people and the story in front of them, they tend to pay pretty intense attention to what's happening.

Zephyr Teachout

#36. Straining to appear judicial, he turned toward the jury box. "The jurors shall disregard the last ... uh ... colloquy between the witness and defense counsel." Might as well ask the residents of Pompeii to ignore the volcano.

Paul Levine

#37. Before we condemn the jurors who acquitted George Zimmerman, we should remember that they were asked to do something extraordinary. They were asked to listen to the facts and apply the law to the best of their ability in a case the world was watching.

Alafair Burke

#38. stepped into the witness box to be examined. The defense wanted jurors who empathized with Muybridge - a married man who had a runaway wife, on the one hand, and a man who confronted a sexual rival, on the other.

Edward Ball

#39. Jurors realize that instead of having to make that terrible decision (voting for the death penalty), they can vote to put someone in prison and ensure that defendant is no longer a harm to society. It makes it easier for them to return a verdict of life without the possibility of parole.

Robert Falcon Scott

#40. The jury system has come to stand for all we mean by English justice. The scrutiny of 12 honest jurors provides defendants and plaintiffs alike a safeguard from arbitrary perversion of the law.

Winston Churchill

#41. Now they will go back to their lives. Some will curse us, some will look forward to serve, and others will look to us for entertainment. We will not disappoint any of them, Brent. They don't need us, but we surely need them.

Kenneth Eade