U.S. jury system on trial: A judge examines the devaluation of jury trials. (Government).

Trial by jury faces an uncertain future in the United States. Critics have long called jury trials anachronistic and ultimately unjust, and in recent years courts have increasingly stripped juries of their power, according to the late U.S. District Judge William L. Dwyer in his last book, In

Due to increased plea bargaining, only 4.3% of federal criminal charges end in jury verdicts, down from 10.4% in 1988. And in civil trials, judges are increasingly taking the liberty of overturning jury recommendations, "giving less weight, that is, to the jury's evaluation of the evidence," Dwyer says.

Dwyer quotes law professors, lawyers, and judges who concur that there is a trend toward taking issues away from juries. "For the first time in our country's history, the future of the jury system is in serious jeopardy," says Ronald Jay Cohen, chairman of the American Bar Association's Litigation Section. "It's happening quietly in state after state, in court after court, and in several different areas of the law. But make no mistake, the right to trial by jury is slipping away."

Public confidence in juries has been shaken by controversial acquittals and hung juries in recent high-profile cases, such as O.J. Simpson's, and the prevailing belief that juries award excessive damages to claimants and that they simply cannot understand complex evidence. The result is a demoralizing loss of jury prestige.

"Institutions held in low esteem can slip away more easily than those we revere," Dwyer warns.

Dwyer blames trial by jury's downward spiral on the way adversarial justice is managed, not on the juries themselves. He cites overcontentiousness, expense, delay, fecklessness, hypertechnicality, and overload as six deadly sins of American litigation, arguing that eliminating these sins of process and access can return credibility and import to the jury box. Among Dwyer's proposed remedies:

* Improve representation of American diversity on juries by increasing jury-duty pay (to make it easier for financially pressed citizens to serve) and ending certain professions' long-standing jury service exemptions (to make it harder for the affluent and well-connected to deny jury summonses).

* Allow juries to be present during sidebars in order to run trials without interruption. "Trial time belongs to the public, and needs to be conserved like any other public asset," says Dwyer.

* Give up legalese. When lawyers say intentionally misstated instead of lied, or subsequent to instead of after, their language can keep jurors from clearly, promptly understanding the situation at hand.

* Hold judges to a higher standard of active participation. To this end, when disagreements in the jury room lead to questions sent out to the judge, the judge should do his or her best to answer, not merely rebuff jurors with an order to keep trying. "Many hung juries can be avoided by better responses to the message from the jury room."

Source: In the Hands of the People by William L. Dwyer. St. Martin's Press, www.stmartins.com. 2002. 237 pages. $24.95. (Order online from www.wfs.org/specials.htm.)