The Jury System In Ancient Greece

A jury is defined as “a body of persons legally selected and sworn to inquire into any matter of fact and to give their verdict according to the evidence” by Webster(2004). It differs from a bench trial, in which a judge or panel of judges makes all decisions. Nowadays the jury system is very popular in almost all of the common law legal systems, so that people of those countries can make sure that the case would not be judged only by one’s personal willing or prejudice.
Although the jury system seems a son of modern democracy, in fact, it appeared a long time ago. When the time is the age of Ancient Greece, Ancient Athens had a mechanism which was called “dikastai,” to prevent the judgment from determining trial only by one’s preference. Moreover, jury system in Rome had not only existed but also improved a lot. At first, the jury system in Rome had become the official way to deal with civilian trials from the beginning of the republic

Then, the development of one country to another may be due to the link of culture. Thus, Backtracking to the root of the jury would be critical to understand modern jury system. Therefore, the goal of this paper is going to describe the details of the jury system in Ancient Greece, in order to figure out whether the jury in Ancient Greece is proper or not.
According to Dikastic Participation(Mirhady and Schwarz, 2011), the jury system first appeared in Ancient Greece, which was called “dikastal”. It is a kind of jury system to make sure that nobody could choose the judge by willing. In normal case, the juror group may contain no more than 500 citizens as the “dikastai”. As for some terrible trial, such as death, unlawful imprisonment, exile, and loss of civil rights, would be judged by 1001 to 1501 “dikastai”. In such cases, the unanimity rule would be given up, so the result will be all based on the