The Chief Justice’s Assault on the Jury

By: Patrick Flomo

Chief Justice Yamie Quiqui Gbeisay has declared that the era of jury trials in Liberia is over. Coming from the head of the nation’s highest court, this is a stunning statement, and the Liberian Bar Association should be condemning it. At minimum, he owes the public a retraction.

The jury trial transfers the power of final judgment from a judge to ordinary citizens, who decide their neighbors’ fate on the facts and the law. It brings community values, empathy, and common sense into the courtroom, and it checks the power of any single official over a fellow citizen’s liberty.

The institution is ancient. Versions of citizen participation in justice appear in Greece and Rome. Its modern foundation is Chapter 39 of Magna Carta (1215), which barred punishment of a free man except by the lawful judgment of his peers. That clause originally protected barons, not trial by jury as we know it, but it planted the principle that power must answer to the judgment of equals. The American founders carried that principle into the Sixth and Seventh Amendments, ratified December 15, 1791, guaranteeing impartial juries in criminal cases and preserving them in federal civil suits.

Liberia’s own Constitution makes the same commitment. Article 20 guarantees that no person may be deprived of life, liberty, or property except through a hearing judged by a jury or other tribunal under established law.  Chief Justice has sworn to uphold that document. To declare the jury obsolete is to contradict the charter he is bound to defend.

His real argument seems to be that juries are vulnerable to corruption. If so, he has chosen the worst remedy: abolishing the institution rather than protecting it. Courts do not abandon judges because some are bribed; they investigate, prosecute, and reform. Jury tampering calls for the same response: sequestration where warranted, rigorous selection, penalties for interference, and a judiciary willing to enforce them. A Chief Justice who answers corruption by dismantling a constitutional safeguard has chosen surrender over reform.

The jury is the people’s share in the administration of justice. The Chief Justice should retract his statement. If he will not, the Bar should publicly rebuke him, and the Legislature should consider whether a Chief Justice who disavows a constitutional guarantee is fit to hold the office