Chapter — Konings, Theologia Moralis
APPENDIX I: ON JURORS
- Jurors, so called on account of the oath which they furnish concerning the office committed to them to be rightly exercised, are men selected from the citizens to perform some part proper to judges. Their function is to pronounce concerning the existence of the fact and the culpability of the accused; but then the judge pronounces the punishment according to the law.
Jurors contract the same obligations as the judges themselves, whose office in great part they exercise, and therefore concerning Jurors the same generally must be said as concerning the judges themselves.
- Query. Whether a Juror can give a vote against the accused, indeed juridically convicted of the crime, but whose innocence he certainly knows by private knowledge?
Resp. Negatively, because this seems contrary to the mind of the law, by force of which, almost everywhere, they must pronounce only concerning the fact, and according to the intimate conviction which they have concerning its existence, nor are they in any way held to render the legal reason of their sentence. Indeed from the law itself they are not held to found their sentence either from such a number of witnesses, or from these or those reasons brought into the middle by the various parties, etc. Therefore they must give their vote only according to that which they think in the forum of conscience. And so, with attention to the office which is imposed on Jurors, it is easily clear that those controversies which are conducted concerning judges, n. 1053, have no place at all concerning them.