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64 U. Colo. L. Rev. 57 (1993)
The Jurisprudence of Jury Trials: The No Impeachment Rule and the Conditions for Legitimate Legal Decisionmaking

handle is hein.journals/ucollr64 and id is 87 raw text is: THE JURISPRUDENCE OF JURY TRIALS: THE NO IMPEACHMENT RULE AND THE CONDITIONS FOR LEGITIMATE LEGAL DECISIONMAKING MARK CAMMACK* When the Jury was hung, and the hour grown late when men go home to bed, a juror proposed that they should settle the question by a game of Old Sledge, for, as he said, 'We don't know a goldurned thing about this fellow, nohow.' So the cards were fetched and the game commenced between the two cham- pions of the opposed factions of the jury. On the stroke of midnight the score was seven to seven, when the hanging cham- pion threw the jack and won the game. So the gallows was built and on it was nailed the Jack of Spades. When the man was brought forth on the appointed day and stood on his own coffin on the cart, he cursed them all soundly for the injustice that he, being a good man at the cards, had not been allowed to turn even one to save his neck. I There is probably no other feature of the law that is at once the object of such extravagant praise and utter contempt as the lay jury. Supporters have revered trial by jury as, among other things, the most transcendent privilege which any subject can enjoy'2 and the lamp that shows that freedom lives.3 Critics, on the other hand, have reviled the jury as a dozen dimwits gathered at random'4 and the stupidity of one brain multiplied by twelve.5 Of all our legal institutions, the jury has seldom been forced to endure public indifference.'6 * Associate Professor of Law, Southwestern University School of Law. Susan Davies, Kent Greenawalt, Warren Grimes, Anne Lombard, David Leonard, Eben Moglen, Andy Rutten, Peter Strauss, Richard Uviller, and Larry Young all provided useful comments and criticisms on earlier drafts of this article. Peter Coleridge and Theresa Hofmeister provided able research assistance. Financial support for completion of the article was provided by a summer research grant from Southwestern University School of Law. I. ROBERT P. WARREN, WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME 27 (1950). 2. 3 WILLIAM BLACKSTONE, COMMENTARIES *379. 3. PATRICK DEVLIN, TRIAL BY JURY 164 (1956). 4. Contra Gene S. Graham, From the Press, in THE JURY SYSTEM IN AMERICA: A CRrrIcAL OVERVIEW 197, 202 (Rita J. Simon ed., 1975). 5. Martha A. Myers, Book Review, 79 J. CRIM. L. & CRIMINOLOGY 548 (1988) (quoting Elbert Hubbard, in DICTIONARY OF QUOTABLE DEFINITIONS 305 (Eugene E. Brussell ed., 1970)). 6. Id.

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