Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2004
Abstract
The quintessential distinguishing feature of the American criminal justice system is the jury. Juries representative of their communities perform the interrelated functions in criminal trials of rendering verdicts that reflect a sense of community justice and giving normative content to the law. When those functions are successfully performed, the jury lends legitimacy to the criminal justice system, bolstering public confidence in the extant rule of law.
Yest the criminal jury's validating functions are critically dependent on its own legitimacy, which in turn requires an examination of two key questions. First, what constitutes a "representative" jury, and second, what is the relevant community the jury is supposed to represent? The first of these questions, grounded as it is in the Sixth Amendment guarantee that a criminal defendant enjoys the right to an impartial jury drawn from a fair cross-section of the community, has received a fair amount of attention from both courts and scholars. The second, arguably more profound and certainly prior question, has remained largely unexamined. The purpose of this Article is to fill that gap, and to do so using communitarian and postmodern theories to explore the idea of community as it pertains to the composition of juries.
Recommended Citation
Laura G. Dooley, The Dilution Effect: Federalization, Fair Cross-Sections, and the Concept of Community, 54 DePaul L. Rev. 79 (2004).
Source Publication
DePaul Law Review