Criminal Jury System in France

Sixteen years after the introduction of the “citizen participation in criminal trials” (hereinafter referred to as “jury trials”) in 2008 with the aim of ensuring public participation in the judiciary and resolving judicial distrust, there is now a consensus on the need to improve the system. In particular, the number of completed cases relative to the number of registered cases has been gradually declining since the mid-2010s, raising the need to strengthen the system. At the same time, some have pointed out the constraints of expanding the scope and scale of jury trials under current conditions, while others have emphasized the constraints imposed by the Constitution, which stipulates the right to be tried by a judge. With these issues in mind, this article examines the French jury system, which has been relatively unexplored, from the perspective of a comparative case study as a way to deepen the debate. Korean jury system is characterized as a mix of the Anglo-American jury system and the continental European lay assessor system. French system shares similarities with Korean system in that the role of the judge in jury trials is relatively greater than that in jury trials in common law countries, and in that the judge and jury make decisions at the guilt and punishment phase, although judges are not bound by the jury's verdict in Korean system. The purpose of this study is to examine the origins, history, structure, and current status of the French jury system, as well as recent changes, in order to find implications for improving the Korean jury system. The nature of the changes in the French jury trial system needs to be examined in the context of assessing the relative level of change. In this perspective, it is difficult to characterize the French jury trial reform as a 'success' or a 'failure'. Recent changes can be assessed as an attempt to refine the conditions of citizen participation in order to make the meaning of a jury verdict clearer. However, it is also true that there are conditions that make it difficult to expand the practice of the jury system in terms of procedures and costs of criminal trials, and that it is not easy to implement alternatives to it. In the end, to narrow the gap between normativism and realism, it is necessary to look at the experience of implementing a system in order to create a detailed system. French case can be seen as an attempt to reinterpret the ideology of the supremacy of juries over judges and the principle of people’s participation to reflect changing times and social contexts, and to find mechanisms to realize it. The principle of people's participation itself has never been denied in the waves of changes. That is the most important implication which can be drawn from the review of the French case.