How To Be Picked For Jury Service

The jury selection process

All Crown Courts have an official responsible for summoning the jurors to hear a case. They arrange for the jurors' names to be selected from the electoral annals. This is an automated procedure, randomly washed past the calculator at a primal office.

The people summoned by the court to attend jury service have to notify the courtroom immediately if they cannot attend. Failure to return a jury summons form or turn up for jury service can event in a £1,000 fine.

Jurors that have agreed to serve on a jury volition be expected to attend for 10 working days. If the case should extend across the two-week period, jurors are also expected to stay beyond their service.

Where it is known or expected that a particular case is probable to get on for longer than 2 weeks, the selected jurors will be informed by the courts beforehand.

Jury qualification

Under the Juries Act 1974, to qualify for jury service you must be:

• aged eighteen-70;
• registered to vote;
• resident in the Uk, Channel Islands or the Island of Man for at least five years since their 13th birthday;
• not mentally disordered or butterfingers from jury service.

Y'all will exist permanently disqualified from jury service if you lot have been sentenced to:

• life imprisonment;
• imprisonment or detention for public protection;
• an extended judgement;
• 5 years or more prison or detention.

You won't be immune to serve as a juror for ten years if at any time in the terminal 10 years you take:

• served a prison sentence;
• received a suspended sentence;
• had a community lodge or other community sentence imposed on y'all.

Yous are besides disqualified from sitting every bit a juror if y'all are currently on bail in criminal proceedings.

If you're a disqualified person and you fail to tell the court this and turn upwardly for jury service, you could be fined up to £5000.

Vetting

The parties to whatsoever jury trial have the right to look at the panel list from which the jury in their trial will be chosen. This allows them to make enquiries about console members and decide whether any should be challenged.

Routine police checks

A Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check is automatically carried out on each juror to ensure there is no butterfingers juror sitting in the jury.

Authorised jury check

In exceptional cases – eg, those that involve national security problems – a more detailed check may exist needed. This may involve a DBS check, Special Co-operative records check and a Security Services check. Such checks are just carried out with the permission of the Attorney General.

Jury selection

The selected jurors are nigh commonly divided into groups of 15 and then assigned to a court instance. The courtroom clerk will select 12 out of the xv potential jurors at random to sit down on the jury.

If any of the jury members know or recognise the parties to the hearing, they must inform the court. The judge then decides whether this jury member should stand downwardly or keep. If the court requires the juror to stand up downwards, 1 of the remaining three jurors will fill the infinite.

Paying the talesman

If there are not enough jurors on the mean solar day to sit trial in all the courts, in that location is a special power bachelor to the courts to select anyone qualified to be a juror passing in the street or fifty-fifty from local offices and businesses. This is what is chosen paying the talesman.

Challenging the jury

Once the court clerk has selected the concluding 12 jurors, they will so enter the jury box to be sworn in as jurors. Prior to this, one time the jurors enter the court, both the prosecution and defence council tin can challenge ane or more than of the jurors.

The two challenges both the prosecution and defence force can claim are:

• To the array, and
• For cause.

To the array

The right to the array will challenge the jury on the footing that it has been chosen in an unrepresentative or biased way.

For crusade

A claiming 'for crusade' volition challenge an individual juror's right to sit on the jury. For such a challenge to exist successful, the challenging party will accept to provide a valid reason why the juror in question should not sit on that case. An obvious reason is if the juror has been disqualified for a detail reason. Another reason would be if any witness, or other political party to the courtroom proceedings know or is related to the juror. If such jurors are non removed from the jury, there is the potential for the example conviction to exist quashed due to a miscarriage of justice.

Prosecutions right to stand by jurors

This correct is exclusive to the prosecution. It allows the juror that has been stood by the prosecution to exist placed at the back of the line of potential jurors and volition therefore only be used if there are not enough jurors.

Lucy Trevelyan LLB

Lucy graduated in law from the University of Greenwich, and is also an NCTJ trained journalist. A legal writer and editor with over 20 years' feel writing about the law.

Source: https://www.inbrief.co.uk/legal-system/jury-selection-process/

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