Jury riders as jury power in twentieth-century England

Abstract This article argues that the relatively obscure practice of jury riders and recommendations reveals a historic political role for juries which has hitherto gone unnoticed. In short, riders mattered as a community intervention into the work of both judges and of local government. This article draws on over 1000 verdicts, both in criminal courts and in coroners’ courts, from England and Wales, 1900 to 1999. In recent work unearthing the existence of jury riders, Coen and Howlin principally sought to reveal what was said by juries in addition to their formal verdicts; this article focuses on what these observations were for. This shift in focus reveals that the type of jury had significance not only for what the jury said, but also for how it was received. Where a coroner’s jury offered a rider, it was a means for informal rebuke, with no definite, automatic outcome (although local authorities often felt compelled to respond). There was power in this sort of pronouncement, but it was often quite diffuse. Riders from trial juries were very different. Here, the statement added to the verdict was much more likely to be a formal recommendation for mercy. Trial juries were probably less free to set out their views in detail, but their words had more formal power, feeding directly (albeit only normally as part of a wider picture) into the sentencing decisions of judges. But while the precise power of a jury’s words changed from one context to another, it was a consistently powerful, often political intervention.