"Jury System; a system in which the verdict in a legal case is decided by a jury on the basis of evidence submitted to it in court." Starting at eighteen, you become eligible for jury duty – something many have to do as one of our civic duties, however, it wasn 't always this way. As far as historians know, the jury was established by William the Conqueror who brought it to England from Normandy. However, this system that he brought was nothing more than a system that had witnesses who knew of the matter in question to tell the court what they knew. It 's a known fact that our courts and laws have changed and evolved since when we first created them, otherwise lynching and stoning would still be acceptable punishments for varying crimes. The biggest difference between the court systems and juries then and now is that the Catholic Church had a lot of say in court decisions. Prior to the 12th century, the Catholic church dominated the legal system. The church had say in what punishments were acceptable and …show more content…
Whether it was ‘trial by ordeal ', King John 's reign before the Magna Carta, or times were the church 's say was final, many agree that the forms of convicting someone or punishing someone was very different than what we know now. After the establishment of Jamestown and other colonies, a crime took a spike without a strong sense of consequences to actions. "In America, the Massachusetts Bay Colony impanelled the first Grand Jury in 1635 to consider cases of murder, robbery and wife beating." After the American Revolution and America had gained its independence, we kept similar courts as England, however; our juries were different. In England, not all cases had the right to a jury, and this angered the colonists and was a factor in the revolt. After America won the revolution, the right to a jury was added to the constitution in several instances so it could no longer be denied. A few of these places were: Article III and the fifth, sixth, and