Cheap We the Jury: The Impact of Jurors on Our Basic Freedoms : Great Jury Trials of History (Book) (Godfrey D. Lehman) Price

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Customer Reviews of We the Jury: The Impact of Jurors on Our Basic Freedoms : Great Jury Trials of History

I found most interesting the details of how juries stopped the Salem Witch trials. Juries also stopped slavery in the northern states, and protected blacks in Detroit who fought back against a racist mob. Learn how a judge usurping the jury's power in the trial of Susan B. Anthony put women's rights back several decades.

Lehman entertains while you learn history as if you were in the courtroom watching.

We the Jury brings home why Thomas Jefferson said, "I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."

Review by Jim Powell
Our system of trial by jury has taken a lot of flack because of the bizarre O.J. criminal trial and all the astronomical damage awards you read about. This thrilling book provides valuable perspective. Lehman shows that "when the jury is unshackled and fully informed, when jurors are guided by conscience and act independently of outside influences, they almost always prove to be the ultimate guardians of people's liberties. Where the jury fails it is usually because the panel is not free to act on conscience. Failures occur when evidence is withheld so that the jury is not fully informed, or where it succumbs to judicial pressure or is otherwise misguided or yields to fear or intimidation." Lehman cites great thinkers like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison who considered trial by jury a cornerstone of liberty. And American individualist Lysander Spooner: "The object of this trial by the people in preference to trial by the government, is to guard against every species of oppression by the government." Lehman supports jury nullification, as Spooner put it: "their right, and their primary and paramount duty, to judge of the justice of the law, and to hold all laws invalid, that are, in their opinion unjust or oppressive, and all persons guiltless in violating, or resisting the execution of such laws." One of Lehman's most exciting chapters shows how juries undermined slavery. He recalls John Adams' dramatic observation: "I never knew a jury by a verdict to determine a Negro to be a slave. They almost always found them free." Lehman shows how, for centuries, governments have tried and often managed to manipulate juries by stacking them with pro-government members, blocking their access to evidence, limiting their mandate to judge only the facts of a case and threatening them with punishment if they didn't render a pro-government verdict. Wonderful stuff in this book.

A brief history of jury nullification.
Judicial history student Lehman has compiled twelve cases from England and the U.S. in which jurors have taken it upon themselves, as a matter of conscience, to nullify or overturn horrific laws that endangered our freedoms. The book shows how the concept of jury nullification has been used to protect freedom of assembly, further voting rights, etc. A good case study history of juty nullification.