Stephen E. Henderson, University of Oklahoma College of Law, has published An Honest Verdict:
In America, we’ve now had 250 years of criminal juries. And our high court will soon decide whether, everywhere in this country, they must consist of the mythic number of twelve. So, there is no better time to turn to where it all began: Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Written and first performed nearly 2500 years ago, and today the only remaining Classical Greek trilogy, it provides the earliest surviving description of jury trial. It is the jury’s very origin story, written to justify and celebrate the transition from clan vengeance to this democratic adjudicatory form of State-monopolized violence, and it speaks as poignantly today as when it won first prize at the Great Dionysia thousands of years ago. For that first jury was not only a voice of the people, but also, and critically, a voice of mercy.
--Dan Ernst
