The exclusion of people with criminal convictions from serving on criminal juries is a widespread practice. In the United States, for instance, all persons holding a felony conviction (an estimated 19.8 million Americans) are disqualified from serving on federal juries, and most states either permanently disqualify former felons from jury service (27 states) or impose lengthy bans (12 states). Similar policies can be found in most other liberal democracies that have a jury system, such as Canada, the UK, France or Belgium. This paper argues that the rules whereby felons are excluded from jury service cannot be justified in principle and that, contrary to current practice, all criminal juries should have at least one former felon among their members. Our argument relies on the idea that a fairly constituted jury is a jury of peers, namely, a jury whose members are in some sense equal to the defendant. We call the norm whereby fair judgment needs to be passed by one’s peers the norm of peerhood (NP). We argue that, on any of the three most plausible interpretations of NP — peerhood as adjudicative impartiality, peerhood as descriptive representativeness and peerhood as membership of the same civic community — the inclusion of former felons in juries is both normatively desirable and institutionally feasible. The paper is structured as follows. In Section 1, we review the practices and criticize the putative justifications for denying jury service to former felons. In Section 2, we offer a historically informed account of NP. Building on this, we argue in Section 3 that all criminal juries should have at least one former felon among their members. Section 4 considers two objections to our proposal. The first objection is that a mandatory inclusion of former felons premised on NP violates the presumption of innocence. The second objection is that mandatory inclusion of former felons is unfairly burdensome to former felons. Both objections, we argue, are defeasible.
