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Book Review: Fascinating history of jury trials informative and entertaining

Web Posted: 12/11/2005 12:00 AM CST

Jay Brandon
Special to the Express-News

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."


Jay Brandon is a San Antonio attorney and mystery author. His latest novel is "Running with the Dead" from Forge Press.


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