A Jury of One’s Peers
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The ACLU has worked over the years to remove barriers to women serving on juries. Under English common law, which was the basis for early American law, women, except in a small category of cases, were deemed unfit to serve on juries under the doctrine of propter defectum sexus, a “defect of sex.”
The Supreme Court, in an 1879 decision, confirmed that a state may constitutionally “confine the selection [of jurors] to males.” Utah, in 1898, became the first state to deem women qualified for jury duty; but as of 1927, only 19 states allowed women to serve. Aside from the “defect of sex,” women were excluded from juries for a variety of reasons: their primary obligation was to their families and children; they should be shielded from hearing the details of criminal cases, particularly those involving sex offenses; they would be too sympathetic to persons accused of crimes; and keeping male and female jurors together during long trials could be injurious to women.
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