english law

[welshfcuker]

to whot extent are juries representative of society?

[sassenach]

They are drawn randomly from the electoral register in the area of the court where they are going to sit so they should in theory be pretty representative. I did jury duty recently and in every jury I sat on there was a mixture of people of different races, ages and backgrounds so I felt it was fairly representative.

[hayley2956]

not very, as stated above they r drawn from random but the chances of getting a complete cross section of society, eg age race etc are very low!!!

[IggyB]

hayley i don't understand your point, if they are drawn at random but do not include a full cross section of all various age, ethnic backgrounds etc then this lack of some groups must thus represent society. For example in my area there not as many asian people as white people - so the odds of having an asian man on a jury is lower than having a white man on the jury... i think this is representative of society in real sense.

the argument that could be made for some lack of representation from various sections of society is that certain groups are not registered to vote and are thus not on the electoral roles meaning that they will never be selected for jury duty - if there was a way to discover if the people that didn't register share some characteristics (maybe income, location, socio-economic group etc etc) then you may be able to identify a group in society not represented