Special jury

Special Juries

It has been said by authority that it cannot be ascertained at what time the practice of appointing special jurors for trials at nisi prius first began, but that it probably arose out of the custom of appointing jurors for trials at the bar of the courts at Westminster, and was introduced for the better administration of justice, and for securing the nomination of jurors duly qualified in all respects for their important office. The first statutory recognition of their existence occurs so late as in the Act 3 Geo. II. c. 25, but the principle seems to have been admitted in early times. We find in the year 1450 (29 Hen. VI.) a petition for a special Jury, that is jurors 'who dwell within the shire, and have lands and tenements to the yearly value of £20 to try a plea which it was supposed might be pleaded in abatement on a bill of appeal of murder. The statute of George II speaks of special juries as already well known, and it declares and enacts that the courts at Westminster shall, upon motion made by any plaintiff prosecutor, or defendant, order and appoint a jury to be struck before the proper officer of the court where the cause is depending 'in such manner as special juries have been and are usually struck in such courts respectively upon trials at bar had in the said courts.' And although Section 17 provides for the return of properly qualified jurors, and the attendance of the sheriff in any cause arising in any city or county of a city or town, it says nothing as to the qualification of the jurors or the attendance of the sheriff in causes arising in a county at large leaving that to be enforced according to antecedent practice, which may well be supposed to have been more perfectly established in the cases of ordinary counties rather than in smaller districts (counties of a town, etc.), by reason of its more frequent occurrence.

The practice with respect to forming or striking, as it is technically called, a special jury at the present day is as follows. Each party is entitled to have the cause tried by such a jury, and the attorneys on both sides, and the under-sheriff or his agent, attend before the proper officer of the court with the special jurors' list, which, under the provisions of 6 Geo. IV. c. 50, the sheriff is directed annually to make out from the jurors' books; and from among those described in that book as Esquires, or as persons of higher degree, or as bankers or merchants; and tickets corresponding with the names of the jurors on the list being put into a box and shaken, the officer takes out forty-eight, to any of which names either party may object for incapacity; and supposing the objection to be established, another name is substituted. The list of forty-eight is next, and at a subsequent period, reduced by striking off, before the same officer, the names of such twelve jurors as either party shall in s turn wish to have removed; and the names of the remaining twenty-four are then inserted in the writ of distringas as the jurors to be summoned for the cause, which persons are then summoned by the sheriff to attend the trial.

The special jury was used most extensively from 1770 to 1790, roughly during Lord Mansfield's tenure as Lord Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench, and declined thereafter. The first statutory requirements for special jurors were introduced in the County Juries Act of 1825, which required such jurors to be merchants, bankers, esquires, or persons of higher degree. The special jury was eliminated by statute books in 1949, excepting the City of London special jury that remained available until 1971 for commercial trials in the King's Bench Division of the High Court of Justice..