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Law, the judicial system and the legal profession
from their duties, especially if the sessions of the court coincided with harvest
time.
15
But it was not only the poverty of the peasants which was a heavy burden
on the jury courts. Different worlds met in court – that of the jury and that
of the jurists. Public prosecutors, lawyers and judges spoke a language which
the rural jury did not understand. They understood nothing, and yet were
to decide everything: not only the question of whether the defendant had
committed the deed, but also whether he was to be found guilty as charged.
The public prosecutor of the Kherson District Court complained about this
as early as 1869, immediately after the introduction of the reformed judicial
system in that province. The jurors, he wrote, were not only incapable of
judging the evidence, they could not even understand ‘what was going on in
their presence before the court’.
16
As a result, rural juries acquitted defendants
if they were unsure whether they had understood the facts correctly, or if they
had fallen asleep in the courtroom from exhaustion. And where they had to
share the jury box with members of the privileged classes, they usually did
what these asked of them. At the Moscow District Court, a professor regularly
forced the rural jurors with whom he sat in the jury box to find the defendants
guilty; otherwise, he threatened the peasants, the court would inflict ‘terrible
punishments’ on them. The rural jurors stated that they had ‘been afraid of
the uniformed jurists and of the gentlemen’ who had sat in the jury box with
them. They had, a municipal juror recalled, viewed the call of the court not
as a service of honour, but as forced recruitment.
17
Wherever the peasants composed the entire jury, rural customary law pre-
vailed. From the jury boxes of the tsarist courts, the rural jurors waged a legal
battle against the law of the state. They not only rejected the written laws
and thus paralysed the execution of jurisprudence, but also raised customary
law to the level of the standard of justice. The state laws, to them, expressed
an understanding of conflict resolution of a strange world to which they did
not want to submit. The law of the peasants was personalised, not abstract; it
referred to the morals, not to the deeds, of the perpetrator. The social status
of a perpetrator, his past and its way of life often were of greater importance
15 N.Timofeev, SudprisiazhnykhvRossii (Moscow, 1881), pp. 134–5, 152–5; N.I. Astrov, Vospom-
inaniia (Paris: Panin, 1940), pp. 211–12; S. P. Mokrinskii, ‘Sud prisiazhnykh’, in Sudebnye
ustavy, vol. II, p. 136; V. R. Zavadskii, ‘V zale zasedanii s prisiazhnymi zasedateliami. Iz
otchetov revizora’, ZMI 2, 3 (1896): 114.
16 Svod zamechanii o priminenii na praktike sudebnykh ustavov (1869–70), pp. 22–3.
17 Timofeev, Sud prisiazhnykh,pp.86, 301–8; N. Tsukhanov, ‘O nedostatkakh nashego suda
prisiazhnykh’, ZGUP 11, 2 (1882): 94, 99–100; Zavadskii, ‘V zale’, 120–1, 125–7; V. F. Deitrikh,
‘O sude prisiazhnykh’, ZMI 1, 6 (1895): 3–4, 7; Mokrinskii, ‘Sud prisiazhnykh’, p. 148.
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