Valuing Truth ‘Fullness’: Lessons from Jury Trials

Public officials across the country took oaths of office during the opening weeks of 2025. Each swore or affirmed their commitment to faithfully execute their duties and to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Can the citizens they serve rely on them to stay true to their oaths? Will their actions principally be guided by our Constitution and enacted laws? More and more Americans have lost faith that they will do so.¹ But based on decades of experience as a trial judge, I believe jury trials are models for attaining higher levels of truthfulness by public servants and reliable outcomes in government.

Thomas Jefferson said, “I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor, ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”² While there are differences of scale between a court case and governing a city or country, the way a courtroom pursues truth provides a blueprint for encouraging the trustworthiness of our public servants.

For example, at the beginning of jury selection, potential jurors take a solemn oath to truthfully answer questions posed by the judge and lawyers. The selected jurors take a second oath to “well and truly try the matters in issue now on trial and render a true verdict according to the law and the evidence.”³

When testimony begins, jurors observe each witness take an oath under penalty of perjury to “tell the truth and nothing but the truth.” Judges (also sworn to follow the law) enforce rules of evidence so that no party takes shortcuts or plays tricks with their narrative. Enforcement of those rules can include striking irrelevant or unreliable testimony from consideration by the jury. In some cases, the judge must prequalify proposed experts before they can state an opinion on a key issue. Lawyer questioning tests the reliability of those opinions, probing whether the witness customarily testifies on behalf of a partisan organization or whether the expert’s work product is funded by a special interest organization. Thanks to these established procedures, jurors learn the court’s high valuation of honesty and come to expect it.

Rather than relying on one robed jurist to render a final verdict, our nation’s founders wanted common citizens to administer justice in dialogue with one another. They believed jury deliberations are a gold standard for reaching truth and achieving just ends.⁴ After hearing evidence and receiving legal instructions from the judge, jurors enter a deliberation room. They test one another’s recollections and assumptions and make witness-credibility determinations. This is their time to persuade or be persuaded regarding the truth.

After presiding over hundreds of jury trials in Washington, D.C., I am convinced that jurors almost always keep their oaths and deliver justice. Studies show that, during deliberations, a jury polices itself.⁵ Individual jurors remind others of the obligations of their oaths and the requirements of the law as stated by the judge. That’s truth quality control in the flesh — and cause for hope.

I maintain it’s time to bring courtroom reverence for truth-telling into the public square.

Admittedly, enforcing oaths is a big challenge. Perjury sanctions are unrealistic in the policymaking arena. Fact-checking by nonpartisan researchers has not sufficiently raised the truthfulness barometer. (Meta’s announcement that Facebook no longer fact-checks — even though users can still flag misleading posts — may be moving the needle backward.) Nevertheless, we must demand truth from public officials when they speak into a microphone, fill out financial disclosure reports, and the like. In hopes of sparking a larger dialogue about how to attain such results, here are opening suggestions:

• A free press, guaranteed by the First Amendment and guided by ethical standards, must increasingly disclose how public officials follow through on their oaths.
• Just as all American courts have adopted enforceable honesty requirements for lawyers and judges (except the U.S. Supreme Court!), other government branches should do likewise.
• Enforcing honesty in the public and private sectors is a complex endeavor. Religious and civic leaders should challenge their communities to propose ways to cultivate a more honest governance culture — perhaps by pointing to their members’ prior jury service. (Data from the most recent decades shows, on average, more than a million citizens serve on state juries each year.)⁶

All who assume office must earn our trust by honoring their oaths. And we citizens must do all we can to hold them to it.

GREGORY E. MIZE is a senior judge on the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. He recently retired from a 20-year judicial fellowship at the National Center for State Courts, where he was a member of the Center for Jury Studies team and editor of the weekly Jur-E Bulletin.

May We Suggest: Going, Going, But Not Quite Gone: Trials Continue to Decline in Federal and State Courts. Does it Matter?

1. See Public Trust in Government: 1958-2024, Pew Rsch. Ctr. (June 24, 2024), https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/public-trust-in-government-1958-2024 (demonstrating an overall decrease in public trust in the government in the last decade)..
2. Thomas Jefferson, From Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine, 11 July 1789, U.S. Nat’l Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-15-02-0259..
3. Fed. Jud. Ctr., Benchbook for U.S. District Court Judges 268-69 (6th ed. 2013)..
4. See The Federalist No. 83 (Alexander Hamilton) (“The friends and adversaries of the plan of the convention, if they agree in nothing else, concur at least in the value they set upon the trial by jury; or if there is any difference between them it consists in this: the former regard it as a valuable safeguard to liberty, the latter represent it as the very palladium of free government.”)..
5. See generally Shari Seidman Diamond, Beth Murphy, and Mary R. Rose, The “Kettleful of Law” in Real Jury Deliberations: Successes, Failures, and Next Steps, 106 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1537 (2012)..
6. Citizens on Call: Responding to the Needs of 21st Century Jurors, Conf. State Ct. Adm’rs 3 (Dec. 2023), https://www.ncsc.org/sites/default/files/media/document/COSCA-Citizens-on-Call.pdf..