Competition Jury

A jury convened twenty minutes before the next round has no time to chase missing evidence. If the umpire's incident report is in one system, the broadcast clip is on a memory card with the producer, and the witness statements were never recorded, the jury improvises and the ruling becomes vulnerable on appeal.

Every member must arrive at the deliberation room with the same complete picture in front of them, on their own device, ready to discuss substance rather than recover facts. A fragmented dossier is the single biggest cause of weak jury rulings.

Case management aggregates the umpire's incident report, attached photos and video clips, witness statements, applicable rule articles, and the player's prior disciplinary record into a single case dossier. Each jury member receives the dossier on their device the moment the case opens, with read receipts confirming everyone has seen the same evidence.

A jury that takes ninety minutes to rule on a yellow-card appeal stops the tournament. A jury that rules in five minutes without considering precedent issues an inconsistent decision that contradicts last year's ruling on the same situation.

The discipline of time-boxing, ten minutes for review, fifteen for discussion, five for vote, must be supported, not improvised. Precedents on similar past cases must be searchable in seconds, not retrieved from members' memory of events they may or may not have attended.

The jury workflow opens with a configurable timer per phase visible to all members, surfaces the three most-similar past rulings from the precedent database based on the case's rule article and incident type, and provides a structured discussion log so deliberation produces a complete record without consuming time on note-taking. The president can extend any phase explicitly with reason captured.

The legitimacy of jury rulings rests on consistency over time. A federation that suspends one player for two tournaments after a verbal abuse incident, then suspends another for one tournament after the same offence, invites accusations of favouritism.

Precedent does not bind the jury but it must inform them. Without a searchable record of past rulings, every panel reinvents the sentencing framework, and players, captains, and federations lose confidence in jury decisions as a class.

The precedent database indexes past jury rulings by FIPJP article, incident type, sanction applied, and outcome on appeal across the federation. Search returns the most relevant cases with anonymised facts and full reasoning, helping the panel ground its decision in accumulated practice while documenting any deliberate departure as a new precedent for future panels to consult.