Trial by Jury: Legal Frameworks and Linguistic Consequences

Abstract

The US criminal justice system is founded on the fundamental principle of trial by jury; indeed, the right to elect for trial before a jury of one’s peers is enshrined in the Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution. It has been calculated that every year in the United States, approximately three million jurors serve in some 300,000 cases, and that 85 per cent of the world’s jury trials take place in the United States (Abraham 1998).