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Book Review: Fascinating history of jury trials informative and entertaining
The Trial: A History, from Socrates to O.J. Simpson
By Sadakat Kadri Random House, $29.95 The title and subtitle are a little misleading, as befits a book by a
lawyer. The subject of this history for general readers is a little
narrower: criminal jury trials. Within that scope, though, "The Trial" is
a thorough and often entertaining chronicle of the evolution of this
creature we use for judging our fellow humans. Early trials were accusation fests, with the juries composed of men who
knew something of the accused crime and already had their own strong
opinions. And that presumption-of-innocence thing is a recent discovery. For
centuries, the presumption of guilt was so strong that defendants were not
allowed to testify, because it was assumed they would lie. Author Kadri, a London barrister turned New York lawyer, writes in a
lively style that keeps the subject entertaining even when it is grim, as
it mostly is. In Europe, the jury trial seemed a device for decimating the
population, when war and plague weren't doing it quickly enough. (At one
time England had well over 200 capital offenses.) The church inspired
justice by ordeal, such as throwing the accused into an exorcized river,
which would reject the guilty. In other words, the guilty floated. The
innocent sank and usually drowned. Defense lawyers were unheard of for years (and are still not all that
popular an idea in many circles). When the modern-looking jury trial
started around the 1200s, many defendants had to be beaten before
submitting to the system, and who could blame them? Sections devoted to
witch trials, the Moscow show trials and the Inquisition show jury trials
as little more than the torture before the execution. This is a semi-scholarly work, full of footnotes, and with enough novel
information to surprise modern lawyers (at least this one) every chapter
or so. Reading how our forefathers tortured the idea of justice, one
begins to wonder which aspects of our own system our descendants will find
insane. Then one goes to the courthouse and thinks, "Oh yes. I see." |
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