equals of the accused.

The question here arises, Whether the barons and people intended
that those peers (the jury) should be mere puppets in the hands of
the king, exercising no opinion of their own as to the intrinsic
merits of the accusations they should try, or the justice of the laws
they should be called on to enforce? Whether those haughty and
victorious barons, when they had their tyrant king at their feet,
gave back to him his throne, with full power to enact any
tyrannical laws he might please, reserving only to a jury (" the
country") the contemptible and servile privilege of ascertaining,
(under the dictation of the king, or his judges, as to the laws of
evidence), the simple fact whether those laws had been
transgressed? Was this the only restraint, which, when they had all
power in their hands, they placed upon the tyranny of a king,
whose oppressions they had risen in arms to resist? Was it to
obtain such a charter as that, that the whole nation had united, as it
were, like one man, against their king? Was it on such a charter
that they intended to rely, for all future time, for the security of
their liberties? No. They were engaged in no such senseless work
as that. On the contrary, when they required him to renounce
forever the power to punish any freeman, unless by the consent of
his peers, they intended those powers should judge of, and try, the
whole case on its merits, independently of all arbitrary legislation,
or judicial authority, on the part of the king. In this way they took
the liberties of each individual and thus the liberties of the whole
people entirely out of the hands of the king, and out of the power
of his laws, and placed them in the keeping of the people
themselves. And this itwas that made the trial b jury the palladium
of their liberties.