1. Why Consider Jurors' Experiences?
A commentator noted in 1881 that Irishmen regarded jury service as “the greatest burden that can be inflicted upon them … they would be delighted if trial by jury was suspended tomorrow.”Footnote 1 He later added, “[o]f course an enormous outcry would be raised about it in the national press, and in public meetings; but jurors … would give anything in the world not to serve … because it is the terror of their lives.”Footnote 2 Much has been written about the poor state of the nineteenth-century Irish jury system,Footnote 3 and it is certainly true that for various social, economic and political reasons, in comparison with that in England, the Irish system appears to have operated in a way that fell somewhat short of ideal.Footnote 4 This article seeks to provide an understanding of the realities facing the jurors themselves, and will examine their experiences of the justice system before, during, and after the trial.
There are several justifications for such an examination. First, it is hoped that adopting this unique perspective of the trial process will aid understanding of how civil and criminal trials operated in Ireland, and deepen our understanding of the flaws and weaknesses of the justice system more generally. Second, it is hoped that by taking into account jurors' experiences, it will be possible to make clearer the practical operation of Irish jury trials and their impact upon the lives of those in the community. Third, it is suggested that jurors' experiences directly impacted upon their verdicts, and may be an important factor in interpreting conviction rates and verdict trends. Fourth, it is hoped that this article will contribute to the debate as to why the Irish jury system appears to have been held in such low esteem during the nineteenth century. Fifth, this should, by extension, shed light on the difficulties experienced when jury trial was extended to other countries. Finally, jurors' experiences have not traditionally attracted a great deal of scholarship, in the sense that most works examining juriesFootnote 5 have tended to take a more institutional approach, examining the operation and functioning of the jury trial in the wider context of the justice system as a whole.Footnote 6 One reason for this, largely attributable to the traditional secrecy surrounding jury deliberations, is the relative paucity of sources providing insight into the experiences of the jurors themselves. Furthermore, as King notes about the internal dynamics of jury decision making, contemporaries tended to note the exceptional rather than the typical,Footnote 7 and this may also be true of descriptions of jurors' experiences.Footnote 8 However, there are various sources, generally anecdotal, which have not hitherto been synthesized, and it is hoped that by gathering these together for the first time, it will be possible to establish a more coherent picture of what jury service in the nineteenth century entailed. Useful sources in this regard are submissions made to parliamentary committees, biographical sketches, sources from the National Archives of Ireland, commentary from regional newspapers, and details provided in case reports, especially in individual reports of trials. However, it ought to be highlighted at the outset that many of these accounts are by their nature intrinsically biased, depending upon the commentator's political agenda or standpoint. In addition, the anecdotal nature of many of the accounts means that their accuracy may also be somewhat questionable; nevertheless the various sources help to establish an overall picture of jurors' experiences.
2. Jurors in Ireland and Around the Common Law World
The common law was introduced to Ireland in the thirteenth century,Footnote 9 and amongst other things Ireland inherited the English system of trial by jury.Footnote 10 As has been pointed out elsewhere, Ireland represented the first “adventure” of the common law.Footnote 11 As well as echoing many experiences – and indeed, problems and pitfalls – of jury trials in England,Footnote 12 the difficulties associated with the Irish justice system were often forerunners of problems later experienced in other countries. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, jury trial was introduced in various shapes and forms to all corners of the British Empire.Footnote 13 Attempts were made to tailor jury trial to its new surroundings; for example, smaller juries were used in place such as Lagos (Nigeria),Footnote 14 Singapore,Footnote 15 and Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe).Footnote 16 Knox-Mawer points out that “[i]t was appreciated that local conditions operated against the introduction of a universal right to the unanimous verdict of twelve jurors upon all indictable charges, but with modifications such as smaller juries, majority verdicts and the restriction of the unfettered right to jury trial to capital cases, the system was introduced to the Gold Coast, Gambia and Sierra Leone.”Footnote 17 This may be seen as a facet of the wider difficulties associated with imposing British laws and legal institutions on diverse and far-flung societies. The assumption that trial by jury was a superior method of dispute resolution was tempered by allowances for the unique characteristics of the societies in question.
One example of an Irish problem repeated elsewhere is the non-representativeness of the jury, which later proved to be a problem in AustraliaFootnote 18 and the United States.Footnote 19 Also, in many territories, such as New Zealand,Footnote 20 Rhodesia, and the South African states,Footnote 21 as in Ireland, the tension between different social, ethnic, or religious groups proved to be a difficulty. The issue of unanimous versus majority verdicts was hotly debated in the United StatesFootnote 22 and in England and Ireland. The use of special juries in controversial or difficult criminal cases was common to both Ireland and Sierra Leone.Footnote 23 Irish controversy over the rules and principles surrounding jury challenges was echoed in Malta,Footnote 24 and later became the subject of consideration in Canada.Footnote 25
Although many of the experiences of Irish jurors discussed in this article were, because of political, economic, and religious factors, unique to Ireland, it is suggested that an examination of how jury service was experienced in one common law jurisdiction might go some way toward highlighting the types of issues pressing upon jurors in others. It is also suggested that some of the difficulties associated with juries in Ireland had already been experienced in England at earlier stages. Although a detailed consideration of the issues arising in overseas jurisdictions is beyond the scope of this article, it is worth pointing out that despite Ireland's unique social and political conditions, many issues raised by jury trial were not in fact uniquely Irish.
3. A Brief Sketch of the Irish Courts System
In nineteenth-century Ireland, criminal prosecutions and civil disputes were generally dealt with at a local level.Footnote 26 Several times a year the judges from the superior courts in Dublin travelled around on circuit to preside at county assizes to hear important civil and criminal cases. The quarter sessionsFootnote 27 were held four times a year or more, if necessary. They were presided over by judges known as “Justices of the Peace,”Footnote 28 and dealt with less serious criminal offences.Footnote 29
In the nineteenth century, criminal justice was administered by both grand juriesFootnote 30 and petty juries, the former consisting of “gentlemen of the best figure of the county.”Footnote 31 First, at the beginning of an assizes, a grand jury decided whether the bills of indictment against accused persons were “true bills”; in other words, whether the prosecutor had made a prima facie case.Footnote 32 Up to twenty-three grand jurors were empanelled,Footnote 33 and a minimum of twelve had to agree in order for a true bill to be found.Footnote 34
Once the grand jury had found a true bill against a defendant, that defendant then went on to be tried by a petty (or petit) jury, consisting of twelve men. The petty jury could either be common or special. The common jury decided the vast majority of both civil and criminal cases, whereas the special jury was used chiefly for commercial cases and politically-tinged criminal prosecutions.Footnote 35 The special jurors themselves tended to be of a higher social standing, and were often men of commerce themselves. The Juries (Ireland) Act 1833 prescribed that they were to be merchants, bankers, or esquires,Footnote 36 which was more or less in line with the qualifications for English special jurors.Footnote 37 Whereas all of those who served on trial juries had to hold property of a certain value, the property requirements were higher for special jurors.Footnote 38 The focus of this article is the common petty juror; the most frequently-encountered juror in the nineteenth century.
4. Who Were the Irish Jurors?
King writes that the various questions we have about jurors “cannot be adequately answered without a detailed understanding of who the jurors were (and of the relationship between contemporary perceptions of the capacities and social status of jurors and their actual wealth, status and abilities).”Footnote 39 Jury composition undoubtedly had (and arguably continues to have) a significant impact on the trial process, although as King warns, the precise relationship between jury behaviour and jury composition is “extremely difficult to assess.”Footnote 40 Although a detailed examination of the composition of Irish juries is beyond the scope of this article, it is possible to make a few general statements about the type of men on whom the nineteenth-century jury system rested. Their minimum age was twenty-one, and the upper age prescribed by legislation varied between sixty and seventy years.Footnote 41 Most jurors were freeholders, although other interests in land could also suffice,Footnote 42 and the actual amount of land they had to hold varied throughout the century. Certain persons could claim exemption from service despite satisfying the property requirement; these included peers, clergymen, physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, parish clerks, postmasters, army and naval officers, schoolmasters, civil engineers, publicans, and masters of vessels.Footnote 43 Others were barred from sitting on juries; these included outlaws, persons suffering from disease or disability,Footnote 44 and, later in the century, persons who could not read and write the English language.Footnote 45 Beyond these statutory requirements, it is possible to learn more about jurors in specific cases, as surviving records sometimes indicate not only their names and addresses, but also their religion and professions.Footnote 46
As noted, jurors had to hold a certain amount of property, as prescribed in legislation.Footnote 47 Under the Juries (Ireland) Act 1833Footnote 48 one had to have either ₤10 annually in land or rents held in fee simple, fee tail, or for life, or ₤15 annually in lands held by a lease originally made for not less than twenty-one years.Footnote 49 One could also be classified as a resident merchant, a freeman, or a householder in a town, with an annual value of ₤20.Footnote 50 A new system was introduced by the Juries Act (Ireland) 1871,Footnote 51 whereby one had to be rated for the relief of the poor with respect to lands of a specified annual value (₤20 in most countiesFootnote 52). The effect of this Act was to significantly widen the jury franchise, admitting men who would hitherto have been excluded.
Qualifying as a juror was not necessarily an indication of social stature, especially after 1871. From 1870 until the end of the century land ownership gradually transferred from landlords to tenants, and increasingly, farmers owned the land on which they lived and worked.Footnote 53 In 1875, 30% of the landowners in Ireland held less than 100 acres.Footnote 54 Of these 5,919 landowners, 2,377 held less than 25 acres. Such farmers, although possibly better off than those who held their lands under leasehold interests, were by no means wealthy men.Footnote 55 Nevertheless, although commentators such as court officials, lawyers and judges considered these men to be extremely poor, they still represented a minority—of the approximately 4,000,000 people living in Ireland in 1875, for example, fewer than 20,000 were landowners—approximately 0.45%.Footnote 56
5. Law and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
The wider legal, political, and social context in which jury trial operated in Ireland is worth considering briefly. After the Act of Union in 1800,Footnote 57 the justice system functioned under increasingly difficult conditions. Waves of crime, usually associated with political agitation, saw increased activity by secret societies, which sought at times to control jury verdicts by the use of threats or violence.Footnote 58 Often such problems led to the crown's adoption of various “stratagems” to secure convictions.Footnote 59 As is clear from Ireland's recent history, in a turbulent society, trial by jury can be one of the first casualties of a criminal justice system.Footnote 60 Two instances in the 1880s also highlight this. After the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish, the chief secretary,Footnote 61 and his undersecretary, Thomas Henry Burke,Footnote 62 “coercion” legislation was passed in 1882.Footnote 63 This revoked the right to jury trial and allowed for special commissions of three judges to try cases of treason, murder, and assault. It proved to be highly controversial,Footnote 64 as did the Criminal Law and Procedure (Ireland) Act 1887,Footnote 65 which also provided for summary trials in relation to certain offences.Footnote 66
The criminal justice systems of England and Ireland differed on several counts; for example, Ireland had a professional and centralized constabulary and magistracyFootnote 67 and a comprehensive system of public prosecutors at an earlier stage.Footnote 68 As well as structural differences between the two countries' justice systems, the focus of debate over issues such as the role of the jury also differed. For example, Getzler suggests that the decline in popularity of the civil jury in England stems from “a drive to efficiency” in the courts' “internal procedures of law making.” He comments that “[j]udges and jurists looked askance at the jury because of its high costs in time and money, and also for the imprecision, uncertainty, irrationality and lack of intelligence perceived to infect lay decisions.”Footnote 69 Although some of these criticisms (notably those relating to imprecision, uncertainty, and irrationality) could be extended to juries in Ireland, this would largely relate to juries in criminal cases. Generally speaking, nineteenth-century Irish jury trials presented their own unique problems, and criticisms of jury trial in Ireland were usually more general than was the case in England.
Social differences between the two countries also specifically affected the way jury trial developed and was experienced. For example, the structure of Irish rural society did not lend itself to the existence of an extensive pool of middle-class landowners to sit as jurors.Footnote 70 Especially in the early 1800s, there was a large rural population of subsistence farmers, who did not hold freehold or long leasehold interestsFootnote 71 in the land they farmed,Footnote 72 and therefore could not qualify as jurors at the assizes or quarter sessions, although they may, however, have sat upon juries in the less formal manor courts.Footnote 73 Furthermore, those at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale tended to be Roman Catholic, whereas the ruling elite were usually Protestant; in England, by contrast, there was not the same religious divide between the classes. Differences in religious affiliation were in some parts of Ireland accompanied by a language barrier; in the poorer areas in the west of the country, Irish was the language spoken.Footnote 74 All of these issues added to the tensions that dogged the Irish justice system in the nineteenth century.
6. Jurors' Experiences Before Trial
a. Getting One's Name on the Jurors' Book
In order to be summoned as a juror, one's name had to appear in the county jurors' book.Footnote 75 This book was supposed to be updated annually to contain the names of all persons qualified under the law to sit on juries, although in Ireland, as had earlier been the case in England,Footnote 76 there were often abuses and inaccuracies in the drawing up of the lists. Under the Juries (Ireland) Act 1833,Footnote 77 within a week after the commencement of the midsummer sessions,Footnote 78 the clerk of the peace in every county, city, or town issued and delivered a preceptFootnote 79 to the high constable and the collectors of the grand jury cess (local rate) in each barony within the county.Footnote 80 This required them, within one month, to prepare a list of all duly qualified men within their districts.Footnote 81 The high constable and the cess collector or collectors prepared a list of qualified jurors in alphabetical order, including the details of their address, title, business, quality, or calling.Footnote 82 They delivered the list to the clerk of the peace, who kept it in his office for three weeks so that anyone who wished could examine it.Footnote 83 The lists were then presented before the local justices in November or December.Footnote 84 The justices, high constables, and cess collectors attended these special sessions, well-publicized locally, in order to determine whether the lists had been correctly drawn up.Footnote 85 The names of any unqualified men were deleted from the lists, and any qualified men who had been omitted had their names added. An amended list was then delivered by the justices to the clerk of the peace, who kept them among the county records and copied into a book, known as the jurors' book, to be delivered to the sheriff or undersheriff.Footnote 86 This was brought into use at the start of January.Footnote 87
In the early 1800s, before any assize or other court sessions where there were civil or criminal issues to be tried by jury, a writ of venire facias was issued, directing the sheriff to return “Twelve good and lawful Men from the Body of his County.”Footnote 88 Under the Juries Act (Ireland) 1871Footnote 89 there was no writ of venire facias, but the sheriff's duties in this regard were essentially the same.Footnote 90 The sheriff took the names from the current jurors' book for the county, and under the Juries (Ireland) Act 1833 he had discretion as to the names he selected.Footnote 91 Because of frequent allegations of biased or corrupt sheriffs however, the Juries Act (Ireland) 1871 provided that he was obliged to take the names from the book “in a regular alphabetical series,” taking one name from each letter of the alphabet and going through the alphabet as many times as necessary.Footnote 92 Although this meant that the sheriff had less discretion in the framing of the jury panel, it did at times give rise to problems; for example, in some parts of Ireland, there would be large numbers of people living locally who shared the same surname; often, they would be members of the same family or extended clan.Footnote 93
When returning the writ of venire facias, the sheriff annexed a panel listing the names and other details of “a competent Number of Jurors named in the Jurors' Book.” There were to be between thirty-six and sixty jurors listed, unless the assize or session judge ordered otherwise. These men were competent to try all the issues at the next assizes or sessions.Footnote 94 The sheriff kept a copy of the panels in his office for seven days before the court sat, for the parties to inspect if they wished.Footnote 95
Until 1871 all jury summonses in Ireland were served by the sheriff.Footnote 96 Generally, he would bring the summons to the prospective juror's home and show it to him; if the juror was absent, a written note containing the substance of the summons was usually left with whoever was home.Footnote 97 The Juries Act (Ireland) 1871Footnote 98 provided for the summoning of jurors in the county of the city of Dublin by post. This provision was not extended to rural areas, because the postal system was not considered to be reliable enough outside the main city.Footnote 99 The Juries Procedure (Ireland) Act 1876Footnote 100 provided that summonses were to be made by a constable or subconstable of the Royal Irish Constabulary. The summons was to be delivered “to the person to be summoned, or in case he shall be absent from his usual place of abode, by leaving such summons with some person therein inhabiting.” In order to prove that each jury summons had been duly served, every constable or subconstable was required to record the name of every person summoned, the day on which the summons was served, and the manner and particulars of the service.Footnote 101 Under the Juries (Ireland) Act 1833, the jurors were then summoned six days before their attendance was required.Footnote 102 Subsequent legislation provided that four days notice would suffice.Footnote 103
The name of every man summoned was written on a piece of parchment or card, and these were delivered to the judge's clerk and stored in a box. Whenever any issue came to be tried, the clerk, in open court, drew out twelve cards. If any of the men whose names were called did not answer, or were challenged, then more cards could be drawn until a jury of twelve was assembled.Footnote 104 These men were then sworn inFootnote 105 to try the issue.Footnote 106
Despite efforts to ensure that all jury summonses were duly served, prospective jurors did not always respond enthusiastically.Footnote 107 In particular, it was claimed that the Juries Act (Ireland) 1871,Footnote 108 which reduced the property requirement for jury service, also had the effect of lowering attendance rates.Footnote 109 In 1874, it was claimed that about a third of jurors failed to appear when summoned;Footnote 110 if accurate, this appears to be quite a high proportion. Jurors who failed to appear when summoned, or who failed to answer when their names were called out three times in court were liable to be fined,Footnote 111 although fines, when imposed, were rarely enforced.Footnote 112 Wealthier men who qualified as jurors were often reluctant to attend, and many of them were quite happy to take the risk of being fined. In any case, the majority of those who received jury summonses generally attended at court unless they could afford either to bribe the sheriff or pay the non-attendance fine.
b. Corruption, Intimidation and Bribery
The Irish jury was infamous for its apparent ability to be bought, persuaded, swayed, packed, or influenced by various political and religious groups. This was particularly true during periods of political unrest, such as the Catholic emancipation agitation of the 1820s,Footnote 113 the Tithe War of the 1830s,Footnote 114 the State Trials of 1848Footnote 115 that followed the Young Irelanders' attempts to stage an uprising,Footnote 116 the rise of Fenianism in the 1860s, and the trials arising from the abortive risingFootnote 117 and the Land War of 1879–1882.Footnote 118 Bribes, threats, and in some cases physical violence affected verdicts, and these problems were apparently well-recognized in early nineteenth-century Ireland; for example, in 1832, during the tithe agitation, the Irish judges remarked that “the duty of Jurors is often discharged at the peril of Property and life.”Footnote 119 Political and social pressures prevailing in Ireland meant that jury service was indeed perilous at times, and many were reluctant to participate.
As will be discussed subsequently, jurors' reimbursement for their time was woefully inadequate, and one consequence of this was that bribing or attempting to bribe jurors was not uncommon. Tampering with the jury left one open to a charge of embracery.Footnote 120 The effects of receiving a bribe seem to have varied from case to case: if found guilty of embracery, a juror could be subject to a fine or imprisonment,Footnote 121 but by the nineteenth century this was quite rare. Sometimes the verdict would be deemed void,Footnote 122 or the jury might be discharged if the bribe was discovered at an early stage.Footnote 123 More often, however, the juror would be fined; in theory up to ten times the amount received.Footnote 124 It was not always the parties to the case who approached the jurors with the bribe; sometimes jurors themselves demanded advance payment from the parties.Footnote 125
Being at the receiving end of a bribe was sometimes the least of a juror's worries; much more serious was the problem of juror intimidation. Interest groups often resorted to tough tactics when securing a certain verdict was perceived as essential, especially in cases with a political edge. Juror intimidation was particularly prevalent at times of unrest, and it was during such periods that the problem became the subject of public commentary. One example of this was the Tithe War.Footnote 126 The early 1830s were characterized by secret societies, such as the Ribbon Men,Footnote 127 waging war against landlords and tithemen, and corruption within the jury system was exacerbated. Testifying before a parliamentary committee on outrages in 1839, a resident magistrate named Hill Wilson Rowan said, for example:
those who act on Juries are perfectly conscious that Outrages are perpetrated very frequently on Persons acting in any way against Individuals either connected with that Society or supposed to be connected with it; because I find that in various Ways it influences the whole Mass of the rural Population; and from a general Impression, which with too much Reason exists, that their Numbers are very great, and that they are very ruthless in their Infliction of Punishments upon those who offend them or oppose them in any Way. Under those Circumstances I think the Jurors are affected as well as Witnesses; and I have positive Means of knowing that Witnesses are affected.”Footnote 128
Another witness who testified before the 1839 parliamentary committee was a man named Patrick Flynn. Although not the holder of any official position, Flynn had served as a juror in a number of high-profile cases,Footnote 129 including the trial of a man named Slye for the murder of a Roman Catholic priest. This occurred in the aftermath of a parliamentary election, when a petition was pending in Parliament, and the area was experiencing some disturbances. Slye, who had been a supporter of the wealthy Protestant Kavenagh in the election, was accused of the murder. A number of Catholics were summoned for the jury, but Flynn was the only one who actually served. He attributed the other Catholics' not serving to apprehension: “In fact so great was the Intimidation abroad at the Time, that many of them told me they would sooner run the Risk of being fined 50l than attend upon the Jury. … They were afraid of the menacing Attitude of the Carlow People; that if they should concur a Verdict of Acquittal of this innocent Man, they would not be safe in the County; that probably their Cattle might be houghed,Footnote 130 and their Houses set fire to; and in fact a Reign of Terror seemed to paralyse the entire Community.”Footnote 131
Again in the 1850s, witnesses before a parliamentary committee claimed that people were afraid to sit on juries because of the risk of assault or damage to property by members of secret organizations. The subsheriff of county Louth said that in agrarian cases, the jurors had “a great objection to being on the jury at all,” and claimed to know of jurors using “ridiculous pretences to have themselves excused,”Footnote 132 because of a “well-founded” fear that if they sat on a convicting jury, they would be endangering their lives.Footnote 133 One stipendiary magistrate cited three men who preferred to be fined ₤20 apiece than serve on juries,Footnote 134 and another magistrate claimed that it was “almost impossible to have a fair trial in the county, say of Monaghan … from the intimidation that exists.”Footnote 135 If these claims were accurate, then the terrorization of jurors appears to have been a significant problem in rural Ireland.
The intimidation took many forms: threatening notices posted up around the area, anonymous or signed letters, verbal threats, fisticuffs, or damage to land or livestock as an indication of what was to come if the desired verdict was not delivered. For example, in R v Fay,Footnote 136 an 1872 murder trial, intimidation and terrorism was reported as being “systematically” practised upon both crown witnesses and jurors. Fay's family apparently exercised considerable influence over the local tradesmen, and furthermore had connections with the Fenians, who enjoyed extensive support in the area.Footnote 137 After three abortive trials, it was claimed that:
the prisoner's father had collected a large sum of money which had been employed in tampering with the jury; that a rumour prevailed extensively throughout the county that any one of the jury who would take the part of the prisoner would get a handsome reward … that the jurors generally, throughout the county, were afraid of injury to their farms or trade, if they should find a verdict of guilty … that eleven jurors who had been summoned had deliberately absented themselves, and preferred to pay fines of £50 each rather than serve on the jury; that several jurors … were apprehensive of personal violence if they should serve on the jury and convict the prisoner … that a juror, in reply to an observation of the sub-inspector as to jurors trifling with their oaths, said, “Would you rather commit perjury, or be shot?”… that other jurors had expressed their belief … that they would incur danger of personal injury.Footnote 138
A further example of the type of intimidation practiced upon jurors comes from around the time of the 1848 State Trials,Footnote 139 which attracted significant attention from both extremists and moderates. The following placard, which appeared before the trial of John Mitchel, one of the leaders of the Young Ireland movement, is an interesting and relatively mild example of the type of pressure brought to bear on jurors in high-profile political cases:Footnote 140
In the majority of cases involving threats or intimidation, the agitation was for the acquittal of a criminal defendant whose prosecution was linked to whatever civil or political disturbance happened to be rocking the country at that time. Of course, as well as some jurors being bullied into delivering acquittals, there were also those jurors whose natural sympathies or allegiances led them to disregard their oaths,Footnote 141 which had to be equally as frustrating for the authorities. Other jurors found ways around the oath, either by returning no verdict at all,Footnote 142 or by “kissing the thumb” rather than the Bible, so as to avoid the sanctity of the oath.Footnote 143 Sometimes jurors appeared simply to disregard their oaths entirely. Whether or not threats had been made against him, once a juror received his summons and attended for service, further discomfort awaited him during the trial itself.
7. Jurors' Experiences During the Trial
a. Conditions at the Courthouse
King notes that “[f]ar too little is known about the layout of eighteenth-century courtrooms,”Footnote 144 and although we know something of nineteenth-century Irish courthouses, it is clear that their layout varied.Footnote 145 Overcrowding was a problem common to city and rural courthouses: in addition to the various personnel in attendance, such as the clerks, sheriffs, lawyers, attorneys, judges, witnesses, parties, prisoners, and jurors, there would usually be a body of onlookers who came for gossip and entertainment.Footnote 146 It is unclear whether there was a specified space for the jury in every courtroom, or whether their deliberations were visible to the surrounding audience;Footnote 147 it appears that facilities and conditions varied around the country.Footnote 148 Courthouses built in the nineteenth century tended to incorporate designated jury rooms, and Brett's work on the courthouses of UlsterFootnote 149 indicates that there were separate designated rooms for petty jurors in several courthouses, including Cootehill, County Cavan,Footnote 150 Clough, County Antrim,Footnote 151 and Londonderry.Footnote 152 Other courthouses which seem to have had designated jury rooms were Ballymahon, County Longford,Footnote 153 Carndonagh, County DonegalFootnote 154 Castleblayney, County Monaghan,Footnote 155 Donegal Town,Footnote 156 Moate, County Westmeath,Footnote 157 Nenagh, County Tipperary,Footnote 158 and Wexford Town.Footnote 159 It would also seem that in courthouses where there was a separate jurors' room, this was directly accessible from the jury box, with the intention that jurors should not have to walk through the courtroom to upon retiring to consider their verdict.Footnote 160
The petty jurors were not always kept in strict isolation.Footnote 161 A newspaper report of the case of Ryder v Burke Footnote 162 gives an interesting and vivid account of the jury's confinement, which in that case was apparently on show for the general public:
It was quite evident that the jury had “agreed to differ”, and had at a very early stage of the deliberation determined not to change their mind, and you might see them through the large open window in groups amusing themselves by chit chat, and sometimes addressing themselves to the crowd in the street. About 10 o'clock a large number of persons congregated under the window and a spirited fire of wit was kept up between them and the twelve gentlemen in durance. One of the jury called out for “three cheers for O'Gorman Mahon,”Footnote 163 which was enthusiastically responded to. Another called out for “three cheers for Repeal.” Roars of laughter were elicited at the oddness of the thing, and certainly it was a strange way of keeping watch and ward upon a jury.Footnote 164
Although there was often a room to which jurors could retire to deliberate,Footnote 165 the standard of accommodation provided was usually poor. In 1875 a number of disgruntled jurors formed the Dublin Jurors' Association, the object of which was to address issues affecting the men serving on Dublin juries.Footnote 166 Chief among their complaints was the state of the jury boxes and jury rooms in Dublin courthouses. One member, F.W. Pim, claimed that the accommodation in one of the jury rooms had been so bad that he had complained to the Sanitary Association. He spoke of “want of ventilation, draughts of cold air, cramped seats, and filthy and sickening rooms.” Another juror claimed that “in a jury upon which he himself served last year for some days one of the jurors became knocked up with rheumatism from the miserable nature of the accommodation afforded, and they had to go on with eleven. Next day another had to be let off from an attack of nausea and biliousness, brought on there, and then they had to go on with ten. The water-closet for jurors in the Queen's Bench was so positively disgusting that anyone going into it would become sick.”Footnote 167 The Freeman's Journal was sympathetic to the plight of jurors, and an editorial complained that jury boxes were “the very perfection of misery.”Footnote 168 It continued:
As if it were not enough that they should be torn from their homes and their business – that they should be doomed to listen for hours to prosy counsel, to boisterous, offensive, insolent, and generally irrelevant bullying of witnesses, dignified with the name of cross-examination–to bear with occasional lecturing and not occasional snubbing from off the Bench–they have to sit through and tolerate it all whiles they are being stifled in a crowded court, and are being agonised, “cribbed, cabined, and confined” in boxes, where, all the time they are endeavouring to comprehend a case, they are writhing and wriggling in unspeakable suffering.Footnote 169
Things were no better in the courtroom: “[t]he boxes were almost as bad as the rooms and quite as uncomfortable. There was no place to stretch one's legs, and nothing to write upon except a scrubby bit of a desk that no trader in Dublin would see in his own office.”Footnote 170 Pim also complained that judges were frequently late, and jurors were often kept “pent up in a dirty, stinking court waiting for the judges.”Footnote 171
Jurors also complained at having nowhere to wait in the courthouse before and between cases. At the inaugural meeting of the Dublin Jurors' Association, it was argued that “[t]here should be a good central waiting-room with a comfortable fire where the jurors could remain until they were called for and not be sent knocking about the courts or passages for days when not wanted.”Footnote 172 It was also stated that jurors “were hopped about from court to court; some were outside, others were striving to get in, and pushing about through queer people of all sorts.”Footnote 173 Similarly, in 1878 Frederick Zurhorst complained of jurors having to walk around with “the scum of the city, who resort to the courts to find idleness and warmth in the galleries.”Footnote 174 Three years later, the secretary of the Waterford Jurors' Association likened their treatment to that of cattle, complaining: “there is no place for them to sit down in, they have often to stand in the passages, and the fatigue is very great.”Footnote 175
In January 1876 a deputation from the Dublin Jurors' Association met with Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, the chief secretary, and made representations regarding various grievances, one of which was the standard of accommodation.Footnote 176 Hicks-Beach agreed that “[t]he duty which is expected from jurors is an unpleasant duty … I think it is only reasonable that they should be comfortably accommodated.”Footnote 177 In June 1877, he wrote to the Association's secretary to inform him that the Board of Public Works would be making plans for the improvement of the jury boxes in the Four Courts over the summer vacation.Footnote 178
b. Frequent Service for Qualified Jurors
Another common complaint in Ireland was the frequency with which jurors were summoned for duty.Footnote 179 There was a dearth of suitably-qualified men available for jury service; this had been a problem in England at an earlier stage,Footnote 180 and was common in many of the territories to which jury trial was extended. In a letter to the chief secretary, Edward Stanley, in 1832, the Irish judges noted with approval that in England no Yorkshire juror could be returned to serve more than once in four years. In all other English counties the period was either one or two years,Footnote 181 and this, wrote the judges, “seems equitable, and to be a desirable object, and it must be presumed that the state of England affords the means of carrying it into effect.” The judges had been asked to submit their views on a proposed Jury Bill for Ireland, which was modelled on the English Juries Act 1825,Footnote 182 a consolidating and reforming measure introduced by the Peel administration. The judges expressed some surprise that “the Bill submitted to us, does not extend those provisions into Ireland,” adding that this must be because
Ireland is not at present so circumstanced, as to admit of those enactments being effectuated. The English statute evidently implies that the Jurors' Book is likely to contain amongst those qualified, and liable to serve in respect of property, a great Majority who would be also fit to serve in other respects, but our Experience enables us to say that the present state of Ireland is different, and does not permit the application of those clauses to this Country, and if they were extended to it, that the due administration of Justice would be endangered…Footnote 183
Such concerns persisted throughout the nineteenth century, and were a common feature of attempts at jury reform.
c. The Rule that Jurors Could Not Separate
The problem of having insufficient numbers of suitable jurors was brought about largely by the demographics of Ireland in the nineteenth century. But there were other factors that added to jurors' discomfort which had a more solid basis in law or the theory of trial by jury. One example of this was that in neither civil nor criminal cases were jurors allowed to separate until they had delivered their verdict, meaning that in long or complex cases they often had to stay in overnight.Footnote 184 On top of this, jurors were deprived of food and heat until they had delivered their verdict.Footnote 185 The length of some of the State TrialsFootnote 186 in England at the end of the eighteenth century had, however, necessitated a relaxation of the rule against separation, and a trend of leniency in this regard continued in both countries during the nineteenth century.Footnote 187 Despite the rule against separation, it seems that the level of supervision varied greatly. It was not unheard of for a juror to wander off and sometimes even engage in conversation with other persons, and there was no cast-iron rule about how this should affect the verdict. Sometimes the verdict was quashed, but particularly in civil actions and misdemeanours, and in the absence of any evidence of jury tampering or misconduct, the verdict stood.Footnote 188
At Daniel O'Connell's high-profile trial in 1844Footnote 189 the jury handed in their verdict at 11:30 p.m. on a Saturday, the twenty-fourth day of the trial.Footnote 190 It transpired that the verdict had been irregularly drawn up, and the jurors were re-instructed and sent back to their room. As midnight approached, the attorney general became anxious, stating that the verdict in this case could not legally be received after midnight on a Sunday. James Monahan, for the traversers, told Crampton J that he had no power to perform any judicial act on a Sunday.Footnote 191 The judge, anxious that the jurors should experience as little discomfort as possible, after such a long trial, addressed them thus:
Gentlemen, I have a very unpleasant communication to make to you. The hour of twelve o'clock having now arrived, I am informed by the learned counsel for the Crown that my jurisdiction to receive your verdict is at end for this night, and until Monday morning. I am very much distressed at it … This is a fatality arising out of the hour of twelve having arrived; you will now retire to your chamber, where I have instructed the Sheriff to provide you with every accommodation. Indeed, he requires no instruction, for he is most anxious to do all he can to make you comfortable. There will be sleeping accommodation provided for you, and every other accommodation you may require, and the High Sheriff will, to-morrow, at a proper hour, accompany you to Divine Service, and accompany you back, but you cannot separate out of his custody … I am extremely sorry to be obliged to announce this to you, but there is no alternative.Footnote 192
This is typical of a more humane approach toward the confinement of jurors, evident from the early nineteenth century.Footnote 193 It is also possible that Crampton J's solicitous, almost apologetic tone in this case stemmed partly from the fact that these were special jurors, and that he might not have been quite as concerned for their comfort if they had merely been common jurors. In any case, the burgeoning sensitivity toward jurors' well-being was promoted not only by a desire that jurors be comfortable and well looked-after, but also a realization that having verdicts delivered by exhausted, hungry jurors was almost tantamount to coercion, and reflected badly on the administration of justice.
d. The Rule Against Meat, Drink, Fire or Candle
The hungry Judges soon the Sentence sign,
And Wretches hang that Jury-men may Dine Footnote 194
Edward Coke wrote in the seventeenth century that “a jury after their evidence given upon the issue, ought to be kept together in some convenient place without meat or drink, fire or candle, which some books call an imprisonment.”Footnote 195 This rule was still operative in the nineteenth century. The requirement of unanimity was one of the main factors behind the custom of keeping the jurors without food or fire until they had reached a verdict, the idea being that men who were hungry would more readily reach a consensus.Footnote 196 Since the nascent days of trial by jury, this was considered to afford accused persons “the best possible method of trial.”Footnote 197 An Irish commentator pondered in 1861 that although “various origins” had been assigned to the origin of the rule, “to me it appears to spring from that maxim of our law, which declares that the accused shall always have the benefit of the doubt. If the case against him were such that it could not be proved to the satisfaction of the entire of the twelve men who had listened attentively to the evidence, a doubt would in fact subsist, and he would be entitled to the advantage of it.”Footnote 198 This rule must have impacted significantly on verdicts in long or complex trials, with jurors reaching consensus simply so that they could break their fast. The tradition was not universally approved. Writing in 1737, an Irish writer using the pseudonym “J. Hope,” for example described the practice as follows:
The twelve Men are to be kept close in the most uncomfortable Confinement till they can agree … unless their Porter is so charitable as to damn his Soul for their Relief, till they can all think one Way. The Contrivers of this Expedient being sensible that there is a very strict Connection between the Mind and Body of Man, and not knowing how to strike immediately at the Mind, play'd their Engine against the Body, by distressing of which they proposed to reduce Reason and Conscience to a proper Pliancy. It is manifest, that they took more Care to have a Verdict, than that Justice shou'd be done, tho' the latter was the only End to be obtained, and the Jury itself but the Means.Footnote 199
There were occasional cases in which jurors flouted the rule against refreshment, and such instances varied from the relatively innocent smuggling of sweetmeats or dried fruit, to the more dubious habit of sneaking bottles of whiskey into the box or the jury room.Footnote 200 In the English case of R v Newton,Footnote 201 a very strict approach to the rule against sustenance was adopted by Rolfe CB at the Shropshire summer assizes. One of the jurors claimed to be ill, and a doctor told the court under oath that it was his opinion that the juror's life would be endangered without suitable medicines for his colic. The following exchange took place:
Thus there seems to have come about the rather ridiculous situation whereby a juror was allowed to drink brandy, but not beef tea. One might be tempted to agree with the sentiment that “there cannot be an Instance given of a more barbarous Attack upon Reason.”Footnote 202
The effect of jurors procuring refreshment without the judge's consent depended upon the circumstances: if they did so at their own expense they were subject to a fine, but if it was at the expense of one of the parties the verdict could become void. This was only an issue if one or both of the parties provided refreshments before a verdict had been delivered; it was acceptable to pay for a meal for the jurors after they had decided the case. The English courts appear to have taken a varied approach to such cases. In Cooksey v Haynes,Footnote 203 the jurors let a string down from a window, and managed to procure beer and food. The court held that the verdict should be set aside, and emphasized that the secretive manner in which the jurors had obtained the food indicated that they knew that they were in the wrong. There was no suggestion that either of the parties had been directly or indirectly involved, and no indication that the verdict had been affected by this. The court instead focused on the jurors' “indifference to right,” which meant that they were, overall, not to be trusted. This seems to have been a rather extreme case; by contrast, in Morris v Vivian,Footnote 204 two special jurors dined and slept at the defendant's house after the first day of trial. One of the two jurors had apparently met earlier with the plaintiff, who regrettably was unable to entertain guests in the absence of his wife. The defendants claimed that it was customary in Glamorganshire for gentlemen travelling some distance to the assize to be accommodated in the houses of the neighbouring gentry, and that the single inn nearby offered “very indifferent accommodation.” They also averred that there had been no discussion of the case with either of the jurors during their stay. The court refused to set aside the verdict, and Lord Abinger CB pointed out that there was no suggestion that the verdict had been against the weight of evidence.
In the English cases of Richmond v Wise,Footnote 205Mounson v West Footnote 206 and Welcden v Elkington,Footnote 207 mentioned previously, jurors who smuggled in food and drink were heavily fined. It seems that although courts were willing to impose hefty fines on individual jurors for having the audacity to smuggle in provisions, they were generally reluctant, in civil cases at least, to set aside verdicts on such grounds. In Everett v Youells,Footnote 208 for example, the special jurors retired at eight o'clock and were unable to reach an agreement. They were to remain locked up until the following morning, and three hours into the confinement, the foreman's servant managed to “convey a sandwich to him by stratagem.” Lord Tenterden CJ said that this “might be a ground for imposing a fine, but it is not a reason for setting aside a verdict.”
The Irish courts appear rarely to have struck out verdicts as a consequence of such transgressions. At the close of the trial in Harris v Harris Footnote 209 one of the plaintiff's witnesses admitted that at the luncheon break, he had treated two of the jurors to refreshments, and told them that he knew more about the case than he had testified. He had to be re-examined, but the verdict was allowed to stand. Fitzgerald B noted that it was “a very unpleasant fact” that the witness and jurors should have been communicating in such a manner, but pointed out that there was no indication that this witness was an interested party. He cited a recent case where the plaintiff drove home from court with one of the jurors before the trial had concluded, and the verdict had stood. Cases like these seem to have depended very much on their facts, and as with the occasions on which jurors separated without authorization, strong evidence of interference with the verdict was necessary. One must wonder, given the many statements about jurors being kept in isolation, how the two jurors in Harris managed to be so unsupervised as to enter into such conversation at all. As noted, the supervision of jurors varied in its effectiveness from place to place, and it would seem that there was a general trend toward relaxing these various rules between the early and mid-nineteenth century.
By the nineteenth century, even members of the judiciary appeared on occasion to defy the rule against refreshment, as in the 1845 case of R v Locke and McGarry.Footnote 210 Here, the jurors deliberated all night without reaching a verdict, and the following morning informed Perrin J that they were “suffering the effects of confinement and want of sustenance.” After the surgeon of the county infirmary examined the jurors and confirmed that this was indeed the case, the judge ordered the sheriff to give the jurors some breakfast.Footnote 211 Furthermore, it seems that a number of courthouses built in the early nineteenth century contained fireplaces in the jury room.Footnote 212
In 1852 the common law commissioners recommended “unhesitatingly” that the practice of jurors fasting be abolished.Footnote 213 They suggested that jurors be furnished with “every fitting accommodation, and with necessary refreshment.” Jurors, they said, were “tempted to escape from prolonged hunger and suffering by compromising his conscience and his oath.” The custom was described in the House of Commons as “barbarous,”Footnote 214 and the rule against fire and refreshment was formally abolished in Ireland in 1876,Footnote 215 having been discontinued in England six years previously.Footnote 216
e. Overnight Stays for Jurors
It has been noted that jurors were required to remain together until they had reached a verdict.Footnote 217 Although this rule was relaxed in civil cases at a relatively early stage, the rule against separation in felony trials operated until the nineteenth century. When jurors were prohibited from separating, this extended to obliging them to remain together overnight in longer trials. It seems that in the early part of the century it was common for the jury, if they were to remain together overnight, to stay at the courthouse. At the 1833 Monaghan spring assize, the jury in one case was locked in deliberations. The court adjourned while they considered their verdict, and resumed at 11:00 p.m., but the jurors had not yet reached agreement. They remained in the jury room all night (presumably without heat or refreshment), and were called in again at 10:00 the following morning. They were eventually discharged later that day without a verdict.Footnote 218 At Daniel O'Connell's 1844 trial, it was suggested by the Attorney General that the jurors stay in a hotel during the trial, which was predicted to last several weeks.Footnote 219 However, after several jurors made representations to the court as to the necessity of their being able to tend to their business affairs, the court ruled that they could return home in the evenings. It will be recalled, however, that before they could deliver their verdict they were obliged to remain together overnight, and they stayed at the Green Street courthouse.Footnote 220 A witness before the 1881 parliamentary committee on Irish juries described the conditions facing jurors who were obliged to stay overnight: “I know, within my own knowledge, two cases where a jury were detained over night, and the discomfort was so extreme, from the way in which they were packed together in this jury box, and from the damp beds, that I do not believe they would have waited another night on any consideration.”Footnote 221
It is difficult to make an authoritative statement as to the type and standard of accommodation provided for jurors. Clearly there were variations between urban and rural areas, and between different types of trial. In nineteenth-century Ireland, particularly outside the main cities, living standards generally were quite low, and it may be presumed that the rooms available for the use of jurors were not luxurious. However, it seems it was not always damp beds and unpleasantness. Sometimes jurors were accommodated in a hotel, as in the cases of Attorney General v the Primate,Footnote 222R v Barrett Footnote 223 and R v Hynes.Footnote 224 The first two were both high-profile cases in which the trial had been moved to Dublin, from Galway and Cavan respectively, and the costs of hotel accommodation for the jurors were borne by the parties to the trial. It is difficult to pinpoint when exactly the practice of putting jurors up in such relatively luxurious accommodation began;Footnote 225 the subsheriff in the 1883 Hynes trial remarked to some of the jurors who were staying overnight at the Imperial Hotel that times were ‘so altered from what they formerly were, the jurors now having so much liberty, while formerly they would have been locked up in Green-street all night.”Footnote 226
The Gresham hotelFootnote 227 appears to have been the lodging of choice for jurors in Dublin,Footnote 228 and the jurors in the Hynes trial were certainly vocal about their preferences. One of the jurors, John Beatty, later testified that the subsheriff's son “proposed that in the case of a lock-up the jurors should go to the Imperial Hotel;Footnote 229 this we all strenuously opposed, and suggested the Gresham Hotel.”Footnote 230 At the end of the day, the judge mentioned that the jurors should be brought to the Gresham, but it transpired that the subsheriff had been unable to secure sufficient accommodation for them there. A juror named Edward Hamilton later said: “We were all much surprised when the Sub-sheriff told us to choose between the European and Imperial Hotels. We all remonstrated, requesting to be taken to the Gresham or Shelbourne Hotel, some jurors stating that they would prefer to pass the night in the room at the Court-house. The Sub-sheriff, however, ended the matter by informing us we had no choice, and that, as we refused to go to the European, he would have us at once removed to the Imperial.”Footnote 231
Jurors who stayed in hotels appear to have done so in style. The Barrett caseFootnote 232 resulted from an attempted assassination in Galway in 1869, and the case gripped the country. Barrett was tried three times, and the jurors in the third trial were accommodated at the Gresham. When authorizing this, Chief Justice Whiteside remarked that he hoped that the jurors “would not be the worse for it in the morning.”Footnote 233 The cost of maintaining the jurors for three days in the GreshamFootnote 234 was ₤27.Footnote 235 They were transported to and from the courthouse in cabs at a cost of ₤1 per day. It seems that the jurors were quite well looked-after in this instance. Records from 1871 indicate that the tariff at the Gresham hotel was 2 shillings per night for a room, one shilling and sixpence for breakfast, and between two and three shillings and sixpence for dinner.Footnote 236 This amounts to roughly 6 shillings per juror per night; therefore the cost of maintaining the twelve jurors at a fairly basic level was probably no more than ₤21, excluding transportation. One might deduce that the remainder was spent on pre-dinner drinks, cigars, and wine to accompany the jurors’ meals; certainly the facts that emerged in the Hynes case would indicate that this was highly likely.
R v Hynes Footnote 237 concerned the murder, by a solicitor's son, of a caretaker in Ennis, County Clare.Footnote 238 Hynes was tried by a jury entirely composed of Protestants before Lawson J, who was unpopular with nationalists.Footnote 239 William O'Brien, editor of the nationalist newspaper United Ireland, was staying in the Imperial Hotel at the time, and in a letter to the Freeman's Journal a few days later, made some allegations of misconduct against the Hynes jurors:
…I was awakened from sleep shortly after midnight by the sound of a drunken chorus, succeeded after a time by a shuffling, rushing, coarse laughter, and horse-play along the corridor on which my bedroom opens. A number of men, it seemed to me, were falling about the passage in a maudlin state of drunkenness, playing ribald jokes. The door of my bedroom was burst open, and a man whom I can identify (for he carried a candle unsteadily in his hand) staggered in plainly under the influence of drink, hiccupping, “Hello, old fellow, all alone?” Having rung the bell, I ascertained that these disorderly persons were jurors in the case of Queen v Hynes, and that the servants of the hotel had been endeavouring to bring them to a sense of their misconduct. I thought it right to convey to them a warning, that the public would hear of their proceedings. The disturbance then closed.Footnote 240
The foreman of the jury then brought this article to the attention of Lawson J, who notified the attorney general.Footnote 241 Each juror swore an affidavit detailing the occurrences of the night in question, and all claimed to have been sober going to bed, although staff from the hotel testified otherwise.Footnote 242 Interestingly, it emerged from the evidence of several jurors that the subsheriff had authorized the purchase of alcohol. Lawson J fined the editor of the Freeman's Journal ₤500 and sentenced him to three months imprisonment for contempt of court.Footnote 243 Corfe notes that “[s]ince the editor was no less a person than Edmund Dwyer Gray, former Lord Mayor and present High Sheriff of Dublin, and Nationalist MP the case created a considerable furore. The Hynes verdict, instead of fading into the obscurity of a minor country crime, achieved the publicity of a national cause célèbre, and Lawson himself became for a time the worst hated man in Ireland.”Footnote 244
f. Taking Jurors to the County Line
An anonymous writer wrote in 1737 that until jurors reached a verdict, “they are all confin'd … nor can they be set at Liberty, till the judge is out of the County.”Footnote 245 On occasion, jurors were transported to the county line if they had failed to reach a verdict by the time the judge was ready to depart at the end of the assizes. Bacon wrote that “if they agree not before the Departure of the Justices of Gaol-Delivery into another County, the sheriff must send them along in Carts, and the Judge may take and record their Verdict in a foreign County.”Footnote 246 This seems to have been used as an alternative to discharging the jurors if they were unable to reach an agreement. There was no official rule as to when this was done. Much depended upon the nature of the case, the public interest in obtaining a verdict and the judge's determination not to leave unfinished business in his wake. It indicates the lengths to which judges were willing to go in order to have cases disposed of, and justice seen to be swiftly delivered.
A detailed description of this practice near the turn of the century is given in Burke's Anecdotes of the Connaught Circuit. Footnote 247 In the case of R v MacDiarmad, tried at the 1793 Roscommon assizes, the jurors retired near 10:00 p.m. As there appeared to be no possibility of their reaching an agreement, the court was adjourned until the following day, by which stage they were still locked in disagreement. The members of the jury were informed that carts would be ready at three o'clock that afternoon to transport them to the county boundary, which lay some fifteen miles away. This threat plainly began to have the desired effect on some of the men, as Burke observes: “Now, the weather was cold and cheerless, and the majority were determined to enforce their arguments upon the minority in some way likely to ensure their coming to an unanimous decision.” The foreman insisted that the four jurors who disagreed with the majority should accede to the views of the rest, and find the defendant guilty. The four men in question resolved not to do so, and as Burke tells us, “a hand-to-hand fight ensued. Fortunately the only fire-arms in the room were the fire-irons, but even these were too freely used.”Footnote 248 The uproar reached the ears of the judge, and the military intervened to stop the fighting; the jurors were brought “all battered and bleeding” into the court, their tempers still high. The judge proceeded to lecture them severely, and they were then led down to the waiting carts. They set off, accompanied by the subsheriff on horseback and a number of militia.Footnote 249 As they left the town, the four jurors finally gave in and agreed to the guilty verdict, but the compromise had come too late. The judge had left the town, and they now had to travel on for hours before reaching him. The conditions were miserable: “[t]he rugged roads, up hill and down dale, were then almost impassable to wheel-carriages—and such carriages! The wheels, revolving on wooden axles, which were never oiled, made a detestable half-screaming and half-whistling sound, as they rolled along into ruts and out of them as best they could! We cannot say that either in their jury-room or in their equipage we envy these twelve men!”Footnote 250 And all of this was for the sake of less than five shillings' worth of stolen property.
Such practices seem to have endured until at least the early part of the nineteenth century. The Ulster Times, for example, reported that after a two-day trial in Queen's County, the jurors were unable to reach a verdict after a further night and a day of deliberations. The three prisoners were placed in a chaise, and the jurors in carts, and the entourage proceeded to the county boundary. Torrens J met the jurors again at a nearby town, and once again they claimed that they had reached no verdict, and were finally discharged.Footnote 251
The tradition appears to have fallen out of favour by the middle of the century. An 1854 article in the Irish Jurist pointed out that formerly, “a jury unable to agree were carted to the verge of the county,” but that “in our more polished age, a protestation on the part of the foreman, after the lapse of a few hours, as to the total impossibility of an agreement, usually induces the parties to a suit to consent to their discharge.”Footnote 252 Seven years later, a paper published by the Dublin Statistical Society pointed out that the pressure on jurors to reach a unanimous verdict used to be “much more violent than at the present time.” The paper stated that “[i]n modern times, happily, these barbarous practices, though not explicitly forbidden by the legislature, have been altogether discontinued.”Footnote 253 Indeed, in an English case from 1866, Mellor J described it as “so absolutely inconsistent with our modern ideas … no judge would commit an act so grotesquely absurd.”Footnote 254
g. Discharging the Jurors
As we have already mentioned, there was a rule that jurors in capital cases could not be discharged until they had reached a verdict. But what if, despite their long confinement, perhaps over a night or two, and their hunger and thirst, the jurors were simply deadlocked, unable to reach a unanimous verdict? Aside from taking them to the county line in carts, there were a few exceptional circumstances under which the judge could discharge them without a verdict.
If one of the jurors fell ill during the trial, the entire jury could be dischargedFootnote 255 after he was examined by a sworn physician. In most cases, the physician swore that the juror's life was endangered, and that there was a high risk that he would die if not discharged. Sometimes this was caused, or exacerbated by the man's existing conditions, such as goutFootnote 256 or old age,Footnote 257 but in other instances it was brought about almost entirely as a consequence of the poor conditions under which the jurors were detained.Footnote 258 An interesting case here is R v Leary and Cooke.Footnote 259 Jeramiah Leary, John Cooke and Micheal Moylan were charged with the murder of John Nowlan near Roscrea in county Tipperary, in 1843.Footnote 260 Leary and Cooke were tried at the Tipperary assizes in March 1844 before Ball J.Footnote 261 By ten o'clock on the second night of their confinement, the jurors had not reached a verdict, and claimed to be unable to do so. Ball J pointed out that he had no authority to discharge them without a verdict, to which the foreman replied, “I am sure your lordship would not wish us to be coerced into finding a verdict?”Footnote 262 They sought to be discharged, and the foreman indicated that he had heard of jurors at previous assizes being discharged after one night's confinement, without having reached any verdict. Ball J accepted that this had been allowed in some previous cases, and continued, “I am now obliged to tell you what I was not anxious to mention earlier,” and he referred to a meeting held by the judiciary a short time before they set out on the circuits, at which it had been concluded that “whatever the practice may have been in particular cases hitherto, they were not warranted in discharging a jury for mere disagreement. Upon looking more accurately into the law, they have arrived at the conclusion, that it is not within the power of the judges to discharge a jury merely because they have remained for a considerable time without any prospect of an agreement.” At this point, one of the jurors informed him that he had been very ill that day, and that further confinement would endanger his life.Footnote 263 Ball J ordered a doctor to examine the man, and the doctor swore that the man's life was indeed in peril. The jurors were discharged,Footnote 264 and Ball J noted that had it not been for the illness of this one man, they would have been detained until the end of the assize. One must wonder at the truth in the juror's claim of illness, which was so conveniently made after Ball J had made his position quite clear. There is the impression that Ball J was reluctant to confine the jurors any longer, and may have been unhappy with the consensus that had been reached by the judges. The discomfort of jury confinement—the cold, the lack of food, and the risk of the spread of illness—may have been factors in this decision.
8. Jurors' Experiences After Delivering their Verdict
a. Payment for Jurors
By the time the jurors were discharged, with or without a verdict, they could have spent anything from a day to a week attending the quarter sessions or the assizes, away from their farms and businesses. Assize jurors often had further to travel than quarter sessions jurors, because there would be several quarter sessions districts in each county, but only one assize town. In larger counties such as Tipperary, this would have posed some difficulty, especially in winter when bad weather and poor roads made the journey more difficult. This was compounded by the Winter Assize Acts, which provided for the joining of several counties as one “Winter Assize County,” with the result that the judges on circuit did not have to travel to every county to deal with criminal matters in wintertime.Footnote 265 As well as the cost of travel, jurors would have incurred expenses for their bed and board during their stay in the big town. An article in the Irish Jurist in 1854, for example, referred to a recent case where a five-day trial had ended up costing a special juror an estimated ₤2 and 10 shillings.Footnote 266 The same writer noted that it was “a well known fact that assizes time is the harvest of the inn-keepers and owners of lodgings in the town, and jurors have no special immunity from these extra charges.”Footnote 267
It will be recalled that there were two main types of petty juror in the nineteenth century: special and common.Footnote 268 Looking at common jurors, a further distinction can be drawn: between civil and criminal jurors. In terms of qualifications, there was no distinction between men who decided civil actions and those who sat on criminal trials. The difference, however, became significant after the trial, because traditionally, only jurors on the civil side were entitled to reimbursement of their expenses. Bacon noted in 1768 for example that “jurors in all civil causes are to be paid for their trouble and attendance, and the quantum is to be proportioned according to the distance of place, badness of the weather &c.”Footnote 269 The amount they actually received was very small; in the nineteenth century, it varied between about a shilling and 1 shilling and 9 pence.
It is helpful to consider these sums in the context of average wages and the cost of living.Footnote 270 The average cost of living throughout the United Kingdom, including Ireland,Footnote 271 roughly doubled between 1781 and 1815,Footnote 272 and average manual wages doubled between 1797 and 1851. The cost of living remained high until about 1876, then dropped again late in the nineteenth century. In relation to the financial impact of jury service on jurors, it was stated in 1881 that “[a]t some periods of the year at the time of harvest, the jurors feel it more than at others.”Footnote 273 This is because the income of smaller farmers generally varied according to the season,Footnote 274 and near 1846, the average daily wage of 6 pence could range from 10 pence in summer to a low of 4 pence in winter.Footnote 275 These wages can be compared to those of skilled tradesmen, such as engineers and carpenters, who were earning between 30 and 40 shillings per week in Dublin by the late nineteenth-century.Footnote 276
In a paper delivered before the Dublin Statistical Society in May 1881, William Dodd observed that “in the administration of the law … the only persons now who are not remunerated for their services are the high sheriffs, justices of the peace and jurors.”Footnote 277 The first two, he argued, were positions of dignity, honour and respect, and were self-rewarding in that regard. Jurors, on the other hand, “cannot be said to receive either honours or social dignity … [or] any direct or indirect reward save the consciousness of having discharged a public duty.”Footnote 278
Byrne v Chester and Holyhead Railway Co Footnote 279 was an unusual instance of the jurors themselves seeking advance payment from the parties to the case. Before the trial commenced, one of the special jurors asked the plaintiff's attorney whether he would agree to pay a guinea per day per juror for as long as the trial lasted. The attorney later explained that he had not thought it “prudent for his client's interest to give a direct negative to the question so put in presence of most of the other jurors,” and he gave an evasive answer, indicating that this was a matter for the defendant's attorney also. The plaintiff, a “poor, struggling cattle-dealer,” was in no position to pay such fees, and after a four-day trial the jury found for the defendants, whose attorney handed the court registrar ₤50 and 8 shillings to pay the jurors. The plaintiff's attorney alleged that the jury had found for the defendant because it was a rich company and could easily afford to pay such fees. A bystander who was sworn in testified that on the second or third day of the trial he had overheard the defendant's attorney tell some of the jurors that “the plaintiff was a pauper and unable to pay the jurors a guinea per day if he got a verdict, but that he—putting his hand to his small-clothes' pocket—had the money to pay the jury if a verdict were given for the defendant.” The court unanimously held that the verdict could not stand. Pigott CB “most deeply” lamented that such practices persisted in civil cases, and he appeared to be, if not quite sympathetic, at least sensible of the embarrassing position in which an attorney found himself under such circumstances. He pointed out that when jurors perceive the possibility of receiving a greater fee from the wealthier party, there was the distinct likelihood that jurors would disregard their oaths. He asked, “[s]hall we suffer jurors to be placed under this temptation, acting upon a mind not, perhaps, marked by the purest virtue…?”Footnote 280
Similarly, a solicitor and attorney named William Henry Carroll had testified that in 1823, he was arguing the case of Lindsay v Keatinge in the Court of Common Pleas, and:
I obtained a verdict for the plaintiff, when the jury demanded to be paid before they handed down their finding, on which I threw up to the jury-box 12 English shillings, which they loudly insisted was not payment, and demanded 1 guinea; on which I appealed to the Court, and declared that, with the sanction of the Chief Justice, I should not pay any more; upon which the Court ordered the jury to hand down their verdict upon the payment I had made, observing, that it was a disgrace to the court to have such a demand made.”Footnote 281
The fact that common jurors received so little by way of compensation for their time proved to be contentious, among not only the men eligible for jury service, but also the administration and the legal profession. In 1854, the Irish Jurist described it as an issue that “loudly call[ed] for reform.” It was pointed out that although there was an aversion to “turning the honourable functions of a juror into a trade,” nevertheless “when these services are compulsorily demanded, the parties should be in a degree indemnified against actual loss.” Arthur Houston, writing in 1861, had this to say:
Amongst other defective characteristics of our system is the shamefully inadequate remuneration, if remuneration it can he called, which is made to jurors, even those on the special jury list. When a man has been obliged to attend day after day in court, waiting to be called on, has patiently endured the tedious witticisms and stereotyped eloquence of prosy nisi prius lawyers, has listened with stifled indignation to the conflicting evidence and evasive answers of dishonest witnesses, has then bestowed considerable time and infinite trouble on the cases he may have been called to decide—surely to hand him a shilling seems a wanton insult.Footnote 282
The problem was exacerbated when the Juries Act (Ireland) 1871Footnote 283 lowered the property qualification for jury service. Under that Act, jurors were to qualify according to their poor law rating.Footnote 284 In most counties, the qualification for a common juror was that he was to be rated for the relief of the poor with respect to lands valued at ₤20, although the amount could be as low as ₤12 in some areas.Footnote 285 This was a revolution in jury laws, giving rise to a whole new class of jurors, many of whom were considerably less affluent than their predecessors.Footnote 286
One reason for the distinction between civil and criminal jurors was probably that in civil actions, the jurors' fees would be borne by the parties to the case, whereas this would be unworkable a criminal context: defendants would often be too poor to pay, and it was undesirable that the crown should have to pay these fees. Another reason for the distinction was that civil cases were considered to be more complicated, requiring a greater degree of intelligence. The demands on jurors' time were considered to be “proportionately greater” in civil cases.Footnote 287 This is further evidenced by the fact that certain types of civil cases called for special jurors, deemed to be better-equipped to deal with complex issues.
b. Attacks on Jurors After they Delivered their Verdict
Even after the completion of their duty, jurors were not always safe. Having delivered an unpopular verdict, they faced the hostility of their neighbours, and the family and friends of, for example, the convicted person or the losing party. Where secret societies were involved, as was discussed earlier, the repercussions could be even more serious. Despite the alleged secrecy of the jury room, a juror who held out against the popular vote sometimes found that his name became public.Footnote 288 In a memorandum on juror intimidation compiled in 1833, during the tithe disturbances,Footnote 289 a resident magistrate from Roscommon named Drought claimed that “[s]everal persons who are in the habit of serving as jurors” had told him that for certain agrarian offences, “if they dared to find the prisoners guilty,” they, their families and their property would be at risk.Footnote 290 A resident magistrate from County Tipperary similarly reported that notices had been posted around the town of Fethard, “threatening Mr. William O'Leary, one of the jurors who brought in a verdict of guilty against the Anti-Tithe Composition.”Footnote 291 Instances of jurors being attacked after, or as a result of, an unpopular verdict can be difficult to identify however. After being discharged from the trial, such men were no longer jurors, and reports of assaults on them may not have identified them as ex-jurors.
In addition, there were several high-profile examples of juror intimidation, the best-known being the attack on Denis Field by a group known as the “Invincibles” in 1883.Footnote 292 Field had been a member of the jury that convicted Michael Walsh for the murder of police constable Kavenagh at Letterfrack.Footnote 293 The foreman and Field had been seen passing what were in fact perfectly innocuous messages to and from the Crown solicitor and were “assumed to be asking his advice on their verdict.”Footnote 294 Soon after the trial, Field was attacked while walking home,Footnote 295 on the same night that an attempt was made on the life of Lawson J.
In the case of R v Barrett,Footnote 296 discussed previously, the jurors at the first trial were discharged when they were unable to reach a verdict.Footnote 297 It was later alleged that “several of the jurors were threatened, and thereby intimidated and prevented from attending the assizes.Footnote 298 John B. Greene, a resident magistrate, swore that there had been “a system of terrorism and intimidation” “studiously and effectually practiced and exercised upon the jurors.” A rumor circulated that eleven of the jurors had been in favor of an acquittal.Footnote 299 The name of the wayward juror (Jackson) became known, and the prosecution claimed that he had been “hunted, stoned and ill-treated by the mob, and was with much difficulty rescued by a Roman Catholic clergyman and a number of the constabulary.”Footnote 300 Accounts of the attack on Jackson differed, with some claiming that his assailants were merely women and children.Footnote 301 It was also claimed that around the time when Jackson was being assailed, a rock or large stone was thrown at the carriage in which the judges were proceeding from the courthouse,Footnote 302 and one man, Mr. Stanford, was struck on the shoulder.Footnote 303 The entire trial was said to have been accompanied by rioting violence and heavy drinking throughout the city.
9. Jurors' Experiences in Other Common Law Countries
As was noted, many of the problems connected with juries in Ireland were mirrored in overseas territories. In the nineteenth century, while the Irish, and to a lesser extent, English and Welsh jury systems came under increasing criticism, the principle of trial by jury was simultaneously being extended to all corners of the Empire.Footnote 304 Either the problems inherent in Irish juries were simply ignored, or there may have been a belief that these problems stemmed from uniquely Irish circumstances, and would not pertain elsewhere. It has been pointed out that the various criticisms of jury trial in England were even more pronounced in the colonies,Footnote 305 and certainly some of the problems experienced at home were exacerbated by factors such as racial tensions and a shortage of “suitable” jurors abroad.
In many territories, once jury trial was established, it became immediately apparent that this system of adjudication would not operate smoothly, and, as in Ireland, modifications were necessary. In some instances these were rather extreme; the availability of a jury trial, or the right to sit on a jury was usually limited to British subjects or European settlers, either explicitly or indirectly. An example is Natal, where non-whites, though not expressly excluded by legislation, were unlikely to hold the required amount of moveable or immoveable property.Footnote 306 Similarly in Lagos, jurors had to satisfy certain property requirements, and had to be able to speak and understand the English language.Footnote 307 In many colonies, jury trial was found to operate particularly unsatisfactorily in civil disputes. In England and Ireland, the availability of juries in civil cases had been significantly curtailed in the 1850sFootnote 308 and the late nineteenth and early twentieth century also saw the abolition of civil juries in many parts of the Empire.Footnote 309
As well as the operational difficulties encountered, such as, for example, the unavailability of a sufficient pool of suitably-qualified persons—a problem in many colonies, such as Sierra LeoneFootnote 310—it is clear that at times jurors' experiences bore similarities in places as far apart as Ireland and the Cape Colony. Although the religious and class divides that dogged the Irish jury system took the form of racial divides elsewhere, the overall impact on the functioning of the jury system was essentially the same.Footnote 311 On a practical level, the shortage of jurors in many colonies often meant that the same men were frequently returned for service,Footnote 312 meaning that jury duty became an irksome obligation, as was the case in the United States,Footnote 313 and as had earlier been the case in England.Footnote 314 The reluctance to discharge jurors without a verdict, save in extreme cases where the life or health of a juror was at stake, discussed previously, was also evident in Canada.Footnote 315 The rule that jurors were to deliberate without food appears to have been made use of in several territories. The ban against refreshment seems to have continued in existence in Malta after its abolition in England and Ireland; at least as late as 1964, jurors were forbidden to eat or drink without the express permission of the judge.Footnote 316 In nineteenth-century Natal, however, it appears that rather than a general practice, the denial of refreshment was a fairly extreme measure taken in exceptional cases.Footnote 317 The discomfort and lack of facilities for jurors that was highlighted by the Dublin Jurors' Association, was similar to conditions facing jurors in New Zealand. A Royal Commission on the Courts commented in 1978 that “[i]t seems that nowhere in the Empire was much thought given to the comfort of jurors—or indeed, to the other actors in the courtroom.”Footnote 318 It cited an 1852 New Zealand newspaper report, which was “alleged to have commented that ‘It is really too bad to pen up a Judge jury and bar in such a wretched bar as our present courthouse’.”Footnote 319
There is some evidence to suggest that judges and lawyers emigrating from England and Ireland to the colonies may have brought with them a certain amount of scepticism of the jury trial.Footnote 320 In the South African colony of Natal, criminal juries were introduced in 1846, and this was extended to certain civil actions in 1852.Footnote 321 Henry Connor, an Irishman, served as a Supreme Court judge in Natal from 1858 to 1874, having previously practiced at the Irish bar for fifteen years. He was critical of trial by jury, and questioned the impartiality of white criminal juries where the accused was black.Footnote 322 Another Supreme Court judge, who hailed from England, was similarly sceptical, whereas the South African judges were more enthusiastic about trial by jury, perhaps because it was a relatively new concept and they were not yet familiar with its defects.Footnote 323 However, despite whatever misgivings English or Irish settlers may have had, juries continued to be introduced overseas.
Corruption and intimidation were not exclusively Irish problems. Jury packing appears to have been an issue in pre-Revolution Massachusetts,Footnote 324 and in the late nineteenth century, sheriffs and summoning officers in some states appear to have had considerable influence over the summoning of jurors, leading to abuses.Footnote 325 Reid points to an eighteenth-century Massachusetts case where jurors were heckled and shouted at by onlookers in the courtroom;Footnote 326 although it is interesting to note that the mob here were agitating for a conviction, whereas in Ireland, popular pressure generally demanded acquittals.
While it is evident that jurors in Ireland were often treated poorly, it should also be borne in mind that they in turn abused the system at times, as did their counterparts in other parts of the Empire. We have seen instances of Irish jurors breaking the rule against refreshments, for example, and smuggling in food and alcohol, and there are also instances of jurors in nineteenth-century United States separating during deliberations.Footnote 327 When taken to inns or hotels for accommodation or refreshment, it seems that jurors everywhere displayed a tendency to over-indulge in alcohol. An account of the 1856 South African case of Van Prehn v Murray Footnote 328 indicates that not only were jurors accommodated hotels, but they were apt to misbehave in a manner similar to Irish jurors, drinking excessively and running up large bills.Footnote 329 In the late nineteenth-century United States case of Riggs, the jurors were taken to a public hotel and took their meals with “a crowd of guests.” The landlord and his servants had free access to the room in which the jurors were kept, and “an adjoining room was prepared for the jury in which intoxicating liquor was put, and to which “the jurors went separately to drink.” The jury had “cards, liquor and a fiddle,” all of which they used during the night.”Footnote 330
Despite the supposed secrecy surrounding the deliberations in the jury room, it was not uncommon for the details of how particular jurors voted to become public knowledge. Again, this tendancy was not confined to Irish jury trials—a Mississippi judge commented in 1887 on the difficulty in keeping jurors isolated from the various spectators of and participants in the trial.Footnote 331 His remarks make it clear that the layout of courthouses in that State was not dissimilar to some of the courthouses of early nineteenth-century Ireland, in which jurors were not entirely segregated.Footnote 332 We have also seen how jurors could be persuaded—gently or otherwise—to vote along a particular political line. Issues of religion probably influenced their decisions in Ireland to a greater degree than would have been the case in England. In colonies such as Rhodesia, Natal and Fiji, where race relations placed the jury system under a “distinct strain,”Footnote 333 this translated into voting along racial lines. Of course, there were other reasons why jurors might deliver “perverse” verdicts–in close-knit rural and urban Irish communities, personal relationships and extended kinship played an important role, as was also the case in various overseas territories.Footnote 334 In addition to individual allegiances towards a particular political movement there may in some instances have been a more general antipathy towards law and order in Ireland;Footnote 335 presumably, among some parts of the communities of the new settlements and colonies, there was a similar antipathy towards the imposition of foreign laws and customs.Footnote 336 Reflecting on the problem of jurors appearing to disregard their oaths, even in cases with no obvious political element, a Canadian commentator commented in 1905, “‘[t]is but scant consideration that is given to the evidence by the average jury. All other considerations come first; the judge, the lawyers for and against, the prisoner, his friends, and then,—why then, if any time is left, the evidence comes in for a share of discussion.”Footnote 337
10. Conclusions
Garnham has observed that jury service in Ireland was “time consuming and unrewarding,” Footnote 338 and King cites some disadvantages of jury service as including “the time and money lost, the waiting around, and the possibility of incurring the displeasure of customers, creditors or neighbours through an unpopular verdict.”Footnote 339 Having considered some of the conditions under which juries operated in Ireland, it is difficult to refute these statements.
With his 1871 Act, Lord O'Hagan had been motivated by a desire to see those who had “suffered perpetual exclusion”Footnote 340 given the chance, as he saw it, to benefit from “that moral and political training which has been of such profit to the English race, from their continual opportunities of taking a public and responsible part in the administration of justice.”Footnote 341 Although this attempt to make Irish juries more inclusive certainly brought some men into contact with the administration of justice for the first time, these men often viewed jury service as more of a burden than a privilege. In 1873, the year that the Act came into force, an official remarked that he had “tried to induce [the jurors] to believe that it was an honour and a privilege to be a juror, sitting there upon the property and lives of their neighbours and friends, and sitting so near the judge, but none of them would take that view of it.”Footnote 342 This was a rather over-optimistic and naïve view of how jury service was perceived by the general public. The better-off farmers and tradesmen no doubt enjoyed the opportunity to go into town and catch up on the latest local gossip, but to the poorer farmers it was a chore; a time-consuming, expensive, and at times, dangerous duty, to be avoided if at all possible.
This article has touched upon some the dangers faced by those undertaking jury service in the nineteenth century. Threats to their life and property were made at times of political unrest; often they were too intimidated to turn up for jury service; and at other times they were coerced into delivering verdicts favourable to a particular political group or influential individual. The article has also considered the paltry remuneration—or lack thereof in the case of criminal jurors—offered in exchange for their services. Dodd pointed out that it was “not unnatural” that jurors “should occasionally grumble” and “complain that their time and their money are not economised as carefully as might be.”Footnote 343 On the whole it was a less than edifying experience, and Irish jurors appear to have endured greater discomfort than their English counterparts. Much of this had to do with the smaller number of qualified men, although the legislative reforms of the 1870s did little to ease their misery, and in fact exacerbated some of the problems. Although the political context, social conditions, and legal landscape were markedly different in the overseas territories, it is suggested that the experiences of jurors around the Empire were often remarkably similar. Although constraints of space inhibit a detailed consideration here of the impact of these experiences on jurors’ decision making, it is suggested that the significance of such experiences in relation to the overall functioning of the justice system ought not to be discounted.
This article has brought together a wide range of sources, and painted what is hoped is a relatively coherent picture of what jury service in nineteenth-century Ireland entailed, notwithstanding the possible bias or inaccuracies inherent in some of the sources. This should enhance our insight into how and why jurors made their decisions; it may, for example, help explain the low conviction rates in Ireland during certain periods, or give reasons as to why Irish jurors apparently disregarded their oaths so freely. It should also indicate some reasons behind the various weaknesses of the justice system. Jury developments in the nineteenth century are particularly interesting because this was the heyday of the jury; as the Empire expanded, it was often one of the first legal principles to be transplanted in the colonies. It is speculated that there were likely to have been further shared experiences between the jurors of Ireland and of other common law jurisdictions. Perhaps in this regard, this exposition of Irish experiences may be of use to those seeking a greater understanding of the development of jury trials elsewhere. Similarly, the exploration of how British laws, legal institutions, and legal traditions more generally were adapted for Ireland could inform debate and scholarship relating to the wider common law world.Footnote 344
