Understanding the Jury System and Jurisdictional Conflicts
The Jury: Background and Nature
The jury is established in Article 125 of the EC, which provides that “Citizens may exercise popular action and participate in the administration of justice through the institution of the jury, in the manner and with respect to criminal procedures established by law.” Of all forms of popular participation in the basic rule set, the jury represents the most perfect, because through it people directly assume the exercise of judicial power. The democratic legitimacy of the jury is, moreover, much more straightforward than the judges themselves and how, by the jury, it is the Spanish people who directly assume the exercise of one of the three state powers: the court power. Not that “justice emanates from the people,” but the people themselves administer it.
Legal Regulations
It is up to Parliament to regulate the jury, and it did so through Organic Law 5/1995 of May 22. The Court Jury is the expression of legal settings that has been given to that institution, which has come to consecrate an Anglo-Saxon model jury, which results in practice in many problems about the validity of the verdict.
Jurisdictional Conflicts
Jurisdictional conflicts elapse between Executive Branch agencies and the judiciary. We distinguish between:
Conflicts Between the Administration and Jurisdiction
All courts and tribunals and all bodies holding the representation of the Administration concerned can pose between the two orders, administrative and judicial review, the relevant positive or negative conflict to a matter of knowing who was, by a request from the other body of inhibition, after hearing the parties and, in the case of courts, after hearing the MF.
Conflicts Between the Ordinary and the Military Court
If the conflict elapses between an organ of the judiciary and a military jurisdiction, after hearing the regular and military MF, elevate the proceedings to the Court of Jurisdictional Disputes, composed of the President of the TS, two judges of the Chamber of the TS jurisdictional conflict, and two Judges of the Military Board of the TS, all appointed by the full CGPJ.
Conflicts Between the Accounting and Court Admin. or Military Jurisdiction
The only specialty of these conflicts lies in the competent court for the solution: if it were a conflict between the jurisdiction accounting and governance, the competent authority is the Court of Jurisdictional Disputes, but if it elapses between the Jurisdiction accounting and the military, the competent court is the “Hall of conflict.”
Conflicts of Jurisdiction
Conflicts of jurisdiction are those that may arise between courts of different jurisdictional areas, but all belong to the judiciary (for example, between Court and Civil Social or other litigation), but cannot be raised, due to their preference over other criminal courts. After hearing the parties and the MF, the court requires the court to order the other who, if he rejected the request, must advise the applicant and both increase then the records to the Special Chamber of Conflict, which is composed of the President of the TS and two judges, one for each jurisdictional conflict and appointed annually by the Board of Governors of the TS.
Questions of Competence
These are conflicts that can arise between courts of the same grade and within the same court order. Between bodies of different degrees (a criminal court and a section of the AP) there cannot be conflicts; solve the above without further action. Such issues normally concern territorial competition. But competition may contain factual disputes resolved. Those questions are always for the superior court under the provisions of the applicable procedural law in his court order.