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Plainspoken justice
11:48 PM PDT on Wednesday, August 31, 2005
California's Judicial Council voted last week to simplify the state's instructions to jurors. Here are two examples of the long-overdue changes.
JARGON: "Innocent misrecollection is not uncommon."
ENGLISH: "People sometimes honestly forget things or make mistakes about what they remember."
JARGON: "A witness who is willfully false in one material aspect of his or her testimony is to be distrusted in others."
ENGLISH: "If you decide that a witness deliberately lied about something important, you should consider not believing anything that witness says."
Jurors are supposed to be ordinary citizens, not legal scholars. So when a judge gives jurors instructions before grouping them in a deliberation room, it only makes sense for those directions to be clear and straightforward.
California's Judicial Council voted last week to simplify the state's instructions to jurors, translating 700 of the directives from mind-numbing legalese to basic English (please see the examples that accompany this editorial).
It is a necessary and long-overdue reform that should help ensure that trials remain fair, juries make sound decisions and justice is properly done.
Instructions are meant to help guide juries through the law they must use to decide a person's guilt or innocence. But for decades, many of those instructions have been freighted in jargon that can leave citizen-jurors with doubts -- reasonable and otherwise -- about the legal path to follow. The result can be a hung jury, or guilty verdicts later overturned on appeal.
The need for plain language is truly a matter of life and death in cases where jurors are asked to weigh "aggravating against mitigating circumstances" when deciding whether a guilty man should face lethal injection or spend the rest of his life in prison.
It is unreasonable to expect jurors to have a legal dictionary handy for deliberations. In fact, courts don't even allow such a helpful resource in the jury room.
And yet, the streamlined instructions have been eight years in the making. The Judicial Council two years ago approved simplified guidelines for jurors in civil cases. The new instructions for criminal cases are scheduled to take effect Jan. 1.
The right to be judged in court by a jury of one's peers is fundamental to our Constitution. That right is much more meaningful if jurors have a crisp legal picture of what they are judging and why.
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