As a non American, I don't understand how juries are compatible with the entire idea of a fair justice system. I'm very very glad they don't exist where I live. The whole idea of "being judged by your peers" is lovely on paper but cases like this show how stupid this is.
> The whole idea of "being judged by your peers" is lovely on paper but cases like this show how stupid this is.
It's part of the system of checks and balances. If there isn't at least a plausible case for conviction, the case shouldn't even make it to a jury. The judge is permitted to throw it out for insufficient evidence.
In principle what's supposed to happen is that it prevents a conviction if the prosecution can't convince 12 random people that there should be one. The problem is prosecutors have the full time job of trying to convict people, and one of the ways they do it is by trying to change the system to make that easier. So then convicts get excluded from juries along with anyone else the prosecution thinks might be sympathetic to the defense -- even though having to convince someone initially sympathetic to the defense is supposed to be the point.
Yep as an American living in Europe, my experience is that most people here are shocked to learn we put the lives of accused people in the hands of non-expert random people from the street. It's not a great system, but it's still only a tradeoff between the bias of one person (a judge) and the average of the bias of many (a jury)
Think you are a bit quick to judge what people in Europe think. Juries have also been widely used in Europe. They are not unknown. It depends entirely on where you are.
Britain famously use juries. That is where the US gets it system from. In. All Nordic countries have had them. In Norway we phased it out years ago, but it isn’t one judge but several. Some are picked by citizens others are professionals. They determine guilt together.
And it's a mistake there as well, but fortunately Brits keep juries only for the worst of the worst cases, jury trials are relatively rare.
>>Juries have also been widely used in Europe.
And now they are not. I can't speak for every reason behind this in every country that decided to do so, but I'm sure if you looked into it it would be "because it isn's working out".
>>but it isn’t one judge but several.
and this is how it should be done - you still get judged by a panel of people who can vote, but they are actually trained in the law.
> and this is how it should be done - you still get judged by a panel of people who can vote, but they are actually trained in the law
Juries don't decide the law, they decide the facts.
Why would someone who spends their life in a courtroom have a better understanding of the facts of an ordinary person's life than someone who actually lives an ordinary life rather than being insulated from it by the legal system?
You can't decide the fact - if you could, it wouldn't be a fact. Or do you mean something else here?
>>Why would someone who spends their life in a courtroom have a better understanding of the facts of an ordinary person's life than someone who actually lives an ordinary life rather than being insulated from it by the legal system?
I mean, that should be really obvious in a case like this, no?
> You can't decide the fact - if you could, it wouldn't be a fact. Or do you mean something else here?
It's a distinction between facts and the law.
The judge decides what the law is, e.g. the statute says "knowingly" and someone sent a letter to the company informing them, but the person who read the letter isn't the person who performed the act, so does that mean the company acted knowingly?
The jury decides what the facts are, e.g. the company claims the letter didn't inform them but the sender claims that it did. Both admit the letter existed but neither of them kept a copy of it. The jury decides whose version of the facts is the truth.
> I mean, that should be really obvious in a case like this, no?
Kind of the opposite.
This is one of the problems with "professional" fact finders -- prosecutors get a pretty good idea of what kind of cases they can win and don't bring the ones that they can't. So then any kind of a repeat player keeps seeing people they're likely to find guilty because they're disproportionately more likely to be the ones who come before them, and start to assume guilt, and then carry that into the determination even when someone is innocent. To mitigate that you need fresh eyes.
>>but it's still only a tradeoff between the bias of one person (a judge)
In most european countries in complicated cases like the one here you'd just get a panel of judges - so you're still getting a vote and a balanced(in theory) opinion, except it's not coming from randoms citizens but people actually educated in the law who should know better than this.
I served on a jury once; it seemed to me that the jurors took the process more seriously, and did our jobs more carefully, than anyone else involved in the trial.
Sure, but you're commenting on an article about a juror who was literally bullied into voting guilty by other jurors - I'm glad it didn't happen to you, but it's not really relevant to this case.
A jury system is, in theory, a decent idea but in practice and execution we've created a system designed to punish minorities and the poor, plus enable corruption with zero recourse.
For example, jury service being unpaid will obviously skew the jury pool away from being properly evenly distributed.
Because the problem isn't actually the jury, it's the structural incentives that mold the system as a whole, including the judiciary.
People like to point out that this applies to trials for violent crimes etc. too, but it was really the war on drugs that did this, because it required the government to prosecute crimes with no victim -- the drug buyer and the drug seller have no reason to turn each other in, as opposed to the mugging victim who can be generally expected to go straight to the police.
Because convicting people when there is no cooperating victim is so much harder, they went and corrupted the system in order to make it easier, and here we are.
A jury has a very important decision to make, which could send someone innocent to prison for life. Selection of those people calls for serious gatekeeping. It's not a community college finger painting night class.
Say, would it be aristocratic/elitist to refuse to fly in an airliner staffed by people pulled off the street for pilot duty?
I didn't mean to bring focus on the randomness of jury selection. (In fact it's obvious that in this particular case, it was very biased, which was a big part of the problem.)
Rather, "juror" should be someone's job.
People pulled off the street are not going to have the critical thinking skills, and will be broadsided by pressure tactics and manipulation.
Also, some people who are inconvenienced by jury duty will be resentful and just focus on their personal exit strategy (get it over with ASAP).
Professional jurors wouldn't be an improvement. They will get cozy with, and biased towards, the people they see and interact with on a daily basis. It completely undermines the concept of being judged by a jury of your peers if there's a permanent juror class.
I went to school at the University of Virginia, which offered something like this for honor trials. (UVA Honor violations were specifically: lying, cheating, or stealing.)
For a trial, you could choose between a random student jury, a jury of Honor Society members, or a mix.
Statistics showed that non-random juries were way more likely to convict students, and I have no doubt permanent jurors would do the same over time.
I understand your criticisms for sure, but the alternatives are worse.
Your argumentation isn't very strong, because you're presenting random jury selection from the population as being the only viable alternative, due to issues in other alternatives, without considering ways in which those could be mitigated or fixed.
Elsewhere in the thread, there are comments about how some countries have eliminated random juries; so a good start would be to study how things work elsewhere.
> non-random juries were way more likely to convict students
All that matters is whether they were more or less likely to correctly convict or acquit.
If it so happens that all the accused liars, thieves or cheaters are actually guilty, then the higher the conviction rate, the more accurate it is.
Honor Society members are not professional jurors; they are just a set of people from which a jury is less randomized than from a broader set.
> All that matters is whether they were more or less likely to correctly convict or acquit.
Which you have no way of knowing, because if we had a process to determine that, we wouldn't need juries to begin with.
What you can tell, by comparing the outcomes between decisionmakers, is which way their bias leans relative to the alternative. And "biased towards convicting more innocent people" is bad.
> And "biased towards convicting more innocent people" is bad.
How can you write that following a sentence which admits we "have no way of knowing".
We can't even say that more convictions is no fewer innocent convictions, let alone more.
Say that 1% of the accused in some jurisdiction are innocent. In that situation, the ideal conviction rate is 99%. It's possible to have a 2% conviction rate where the convictions are wrong half the time (and the acquittals are all wrong), and a 1% conviction rate where the decisions are all backwards in relation to guilt.
You're assuming the full-time aristocrat will do a better job, which is the thing there is no evidence of. It could be completely the opposite -- the aristocrat makes their decisions based on political connectedness, finding everyone guilty except their cronies who are actually guilty.
In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the assumption should not be that either of them is inherently better at the job, and then a higher total conviction rate implies a higher false conviction rate.
