Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Back to the old ways

There was some fanfare when Russia announced the beginning of a transition from an inquisitorial judicial system to an adversarial system. Since then, the lure of the old ways of doing things has been powerful and the transition process has been reversed.

In Russia, Jury Is Something to Work Around

Juries were supposed to change Russia. Introduced amid a raft of liberal reforms in 1993, they shifted power away from the state structure and thrust it into the hands of citizens. Juries introduced real competition into Russia’s courts, granting acquittals in 15 to 20 percent of cases, compared with less than 1 percent in cases decided by judges.

But the state has never been happy about leaving the fate of high-profile prosecutions in the hands of ordinary people.

Some juries skeptical of a prosecution have been dismissed on the verge of important verdicts. When they vote to acquit, their verdicts are routinely overturned by higher courts, allowing prosecutors to try for a conviction before another jury. Lawmakers are continuously chipping away at what types of criminal offenses merit a jury trial.

Meanwhile, the number of jury trials remains so small — around 600 a year out of a total of more than one million — that they vanish into a justice system that in some important ways has changed little since Soviet days...
See also:
Basic disagreements
Comparative legal systems
Rule of law but not jury in Russia
Rule of law in Russia
Russian Legal System