I didn’t know that Russia had trial by jury now. But here is a movie about it: “12″

The little YouTube blurb said it’s somewhat like “12 Angry Men.” I haven’t seen that movie, but I think I read the play script in high school. Or maybe I did see the movie way back. It sounds familiar, anyway.

I googled for some information and learned that Russia adopted (or re-adopted) trial by jury in 1993. I picked this article as something to read, just for the sake of starting somewhere. It sounds like it was written around 1999, so I’m not sure how up-to-date it is.

This paragraph reminded me of the movie Mimino:

…the institution of returning the case for reinvestigation is closely connected with a lot of other provisions in our criminal procedure. For example, the absence of the advocate’s right to collect evidence. Having no possibility to collect evidence independently, the advocate in our criminal procedure sometimes has to petition to return the case for reinvestigation.

So if that’s the case, what was that cute young attorney doing for our hero in Mimino, when she put all that work into collecting evidence independently?

The strange part of the article is the final section, which bear no connection to all the informative material that has gone before. It starts with this paragraph:

Trial by jury is, probably, the privilege of a stable society. It must be stable in the economic, social, political, and legal respects. In the opposite case trial by jury is doomed to live out a miserable existence. Trial by jury in Russia is a vivid example of that.

Say what? I’m not sure there is any such thing as a stable society. Everything is always changing. And why does that matter, anyway? The author breathes not a word of argument or evidence to support her assertion that trial by jury is doomed where society is unstable. So why did she say something like that?

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