The Legal Status of Jurors in the Administration of Justice in Criminal Cases

The article provides an overview of modern Russian legislation regulating the legal status of a juror. The comparative analysis of normative acts regulating the activities of judges and jurors allows us to conclude that there are inconsistent legal norms that significantly complicate modern law enforcement practice. A number of problems related to the procedural regulation of the procedure for the formation of a legal panel of jurors have been identified, namely: dual citizenship of a candidate for jurors; the procedure for identifying circumstances that prevent a citizen from participating in a criminal case; the age of a juror, etc.

In addition, the article presents judicial practice in criminal cases considered in 2018–2020 by the Irkutsk Regional Court and district (city) courts of the Irkutsk region with the participation of jurors, confirming the need to edit and amend certain provisions of the federal law “On jurors of Federal courts of general jurisdiction in the Russian Federation”. New versions of these provisions of the law have been proposed.

Examples of restrictions for candidates for jurors and people’s assessors (sheffen) in the legislation of other countries (the Kingdom of Spain, the Republic of Austria, Georgia), such as age, profession, official position, education, are given. At the same time, attention is drawn to the fact that for foreign practice, these circumstances are a direct ban on participation in the process, and not the basis for unconditional recusal.

It is concluded that bringing the norms regulating the position of jurors to uniformity will eliminate the discrepancy between the law by law enforcers, facilitate the work of the courts on the formation of the collegium and, in general, will contribute to increasing the authority of jurors and the judiciary.