I strongly disagree with the recent Martha Stewart verdict. Certainly, I don’t think she was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, because I think there was more than one reasonable doubt in that case. Anyways, that is not what I want to debate here. My question is simply: If you know you’re innocent of the charges, should you really have a jury try you? Juries can be very biased. And sadly many times they don’t even know what they are doing. A judge would at least follow the exact letter of the law, and apply legal principles (like “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt”) the exact way they were meant to be applied. I don’t know about the rest of you. But if I knew I was innocent, I might waive my right to jury, in the hopes that the impartial judge would see the case had no real merit.
Lawyers prefer juries because lawyers know they can buffalo juries. Juries are easier to be swayed along by means of pure emotional appeal. Prosecutor has a very weak case on a murder trial? Doesn’t matter! He can just keep stressing how horrible the circumstances of the murder is. That’s enough to convince many people that the accused MUST BE PUNISHED. It doesn’t matter that the accused might be innocent–a nice government official is associating him with such horrible acts. The idea is to get the jury into such a froth that they don’t care who they make suffer–only that they make SOMEbody suffer for the crime.
“Hanging ought to be retained for murder most foul. We shouldn’t have all these campaigns to get the Birmingham Six released if they had been hanged, they would have been forgotten and the whole community would have been satisfied.”
seems like a judge could display prejudice or just ineptitude too. do the lawyer-dopers have an opinion about whether a judge-only conviction might be more or less likely to be overturned on appeal than a conviction rendered by a jury? one concern seems to me to be that at a jury trial the judge gets to preview certain evidence/testimony and then decide whether it is proper for the jury to see it. at a judge-only trial, can a judge render a fair verdict if he knows about previous convictions, questionable confessions, graphic crime-scene pictures, etc. that a jury would never see?
There’d be the temptation if I were innocent to think that a reasonable, rational judge would surely see the truth and let me go. Unfortunately, the robes don’t guarantee that the judge will be impartial. Some judges are fair and balanced, but just watch FOX News sometimes and you’ll see that not everyone who claims to be actually is. One problem with a judge is that the fact that you happen to be innocent might sway the judge less than whether or not the evidence which can be legally admitted points to guilt. The judge might be more concerned with a fair trial than a just result.
If it were just a matter of trusting an experienced judge or potentially rookie jury members, I might be inclined to go with the judge. But the reason I’d want the jury is a matter of numbers. The prosecutor would have to convince all of the jurors (or in some cases most of the jurors) that I was guilty. But with a judge, he’d only have to convince one person. I prefer the odds of my having to get one out of twelve people to recognize my innocense. I would be a lot more nervous if the prosecutor had to convince only one person instead of 12.
Gosh, you must be really warm under that blanket statement. Me, I’ve dealt with both judges and juries, and the determination of which I’d rather have depends entirely on who the judge is, what the local jury pool is like, and what my case is.
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