Trial by jury in Russia and international experience

Criminal proceedings before a jury are the most important constitutional guarantee of citizens' direct participation in the administration of justice. Scientists discover the roots of the jury trial in the 4th century BC in Athens. Subsequently, the jury trial manifested itself in a more developed form in England in 829 A.D. and subsequently spread in one form or another to a number of European countries, including Russia, as well as the United States. The Soviet period of the development of the Russian state was not associated with the development of this institution. However, in the Russian Federation, the jury trial was reborn and returned to domestic criminal proceedings. When writing the article, the author applied a dialectical approach to the study of the phenomenon in its development and constant movement. Thus, the development of the domestic jury trial was traced, taking into account the prerequisites arising from the world experience of its development. The historical method, the method of system analysis and the statistical method were also applied. The main conclusions of the study are the establishment of a link between the emergence of other democratic principles in state building and the emergence of the jury trial. According to the idea of the reformers of the Russian criminal justice system, the jury trial at the apogee of its development should maximize the participation of the popular element in the administration of justice before the crown court, and even more so in a modern democratic society. The functioning of the jury trial is fraught with a number of problems, the main of which is the qualitative potential of the jury and the ability of the public prosecutor to present evidence in their interrelation, on which the fairness of the verdict directly depends. A special contribution of the author to the research of the topic is the introduction into the scientific discourse of rare historical sources that had not previously been found in publications on this topic. The novelty of the research lies in studying the experience of the domestic jury trial from the perspective of the functioning of the prosecutor – public prosecutor in it, analyzing the methodological recommendations of practicing lawyers of the 19th and early 20th centuries in relation to the current stage of development of this institution.

Jury trial, state prosecution, prosecutor, criminal prosecution, jurors, complicated criminal proceedings, public prosecutor, prosecution, competitiveness of the parties, administration of justice