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.
