In order to be chosen for either a Grand Jury or a Petit Jury, you had to
be a freeholder -- i.e. a property holder.  Jury qualifications are re-
enacted at various points in time and can be found in Hening's Statuates.


I'm sorry I'm not answereing this from my home office, so I can't come up
with the full citations at this time.

Propery holders never made up more that 10-20% of the free population of
most counties, hence the jury selection pool was always small.  Moreover,
the selection had to be made from among those qualified who happened to be
available at Court at the time of the trial, hence making the pool even
smaller for any given trial.  Impartiality was not a qualification for jury
duty -- at least not in the sense we'd think of it today.  Knowing
something about the facts of the case at issue was actually considered to
be a desireable qualification!

I hope this helps,

Peter V. Bergstrom



On Thu, 12 Apr 2001 09:53:31 EDT, [log in to unmask] wrote:

>     In researching court records for the 1750-1775 timeframe in the
Northern
>Neck of VA., I find repeated mention of the Sheriff being ordered to summon
>'qualified' persons for jury duty.
>
>     In reviewing jury lists, the persons served over and over again, but
>they represent only a small fraction of the total male population of any
>given county at any given time.
>
>     What was the qualification for serving on a jury in this period?
>
>     Bill Balderson
>
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