ABSTRACT
The jury system remains the cornerstone of the criminal trial1 in the Commonwealth Caribbean as it is in England and the US. This is so despite the fact that only a small minority of defendants qualify for jury trial, since most criminal offences are summary or may be tried summarily. Nonetheless, the right to trial by jury is regarded as basic to trials for all serious offences in democratic societies. In fact when, some 20 years ago, a trial judge in Bermuda purported to try a criminal matter in the Supreme Court without a jury because of the difficulty of obtaining an impartial jury in the small State, the Court of Appeal of Bermuda had this to say:
Trial by jury in England is said to have originated during the 11th century during the reign of Henry II. It eventually evolved from a powerless institution to one which shared even power with the judge and came into its own during the struggles in the reign of Charles II (who was beheaded) and James II.3 Despite the established tradition of jury trial for serious offences in countries with the common law legal system, it has been the subject of attack as in this scathing denunciation by Oppenheimer:4
Nonetheless, there have been many supporters of the system of jury trials who argue that juries are generally more right than judges. This type of comment has come from judges5 themselves who have tried numerous cases with juries. In any event, trial by jury remains the one method of trying persons
who have been charged with serious indictable offences such as murder, manslaughter and rape. While statute has intervened to permit summary trial by a magistrate for some indictable offences in specified circumstances,6 this is only as regards those stipulated in the legislation, which never include capital offences and are usually less serious offences.
