It really isnt. Many people WANT to serve on Juries, I volunteered to serve on the County Civil Grand Jury for a year- along with 20+ others (not all were selected of course). Great experience.
Not to mention, if you are gonna quote someone, give their name- in this case Norm Crosby- a comedian, not a political expert.” It was a JOKE son, a joke.” (Foghorn Leghorn). Dont base political opinions on jokes. So Babale should have mentioned that was a joke by Norm Crosby.
Now the defendant can ask that just a judge try his case.
Aside from the high salaries of judges and the burden that would bear on the court system, the assumption that judges would have “the same spread of bias as a jury” is probably not true; judges are either elected (in county and most state systems) or appointed by political interests (in federal and some state systems). It is pretty easy to see how this could create biases in a ‘judges pool’ that would be somewhat mediated in twelve pseudorandomly-selected members of the public.
Outside of financial crimes, most criminal cases are not complex with respect to the legal aspects or interpretation of the law applicable to the commission of the crime, and in most of the technical aspects of forensics and other science used to interpret evidence judges are not especially more conversant than the average citizen. Juries are asked to make a decision largely based upon the strength of the evidence and testimony and to guide the jurors on the applicable points of law the presiding judge provides a series of instructions which summarize the applicable aspects of common and statute law, with judges directing jurors to disregard arguments or instructions from counsel which contradict their directions. Where interpretations of caselaw or other non-statute precedent is argued, a judge makes decisions on admissibility of evidence or testimony, and arguments over that are referred to an appellate court in the case of a conviction obtained upon questionable legal basis.
This is not to saw that the jury system is in any way perfect, and perhaps having a pool of semi-professional jurists who are conversant with the finer points of criminal law and civil rights, court and police procedure, and at least a background knowledge in forensics would be a better option, but then you’d have to find and train those people, pay them a living wage (since this presumably a full-time job or at least something they could do between other gigs), and assuring a representation of viewpoints to prevent bias would be a very difficult problem. As @engineer_comp_geek notes, when people see on juries and deliberate the peer pressure and group dynamics tends to make people take the job of weighing someones’s fate seriously (not withstanding jurors on celebrity trials sometimes using their position to get publicity, albeit usually after the conclusion of the trial).
In the US. As I mentioned above, in my country of residence, judges are insulated from these influences. The judicial branch entirely self-selects its own membership based on its own professional criteria.
That’s not a necessity of the system e.g. you could make x hours of minimum-wage judge duty a requirement for all lawyers to maintain legal accreditation.
Or it could be just a professional qualification, like being lawyer is. Like, the Masters equivalent of a law degree. Or, as above, something all lawyers can do - or all lawyers with sufficient experience, maybe, and possibly only in their sub-field.
Except they’re not - jury selection is part of the system, where jurors get evaluated and rejected.
That’s not my understanding. I’m mostly familiar with environmental law when it comes to criminal cases, and those are decidedly complex.
i.e. have control over what the the jury will see anyway. Our way cuts out the middleman.
Which can lead to an insular or unconscious bias even if the judges are intent upon selecting against obvious prejudice.
Oh, sure. As I noted, it isn’t as if selecting twelve laypersons to pass judgement is in anyway free of errors, prejudices, manipulation, et cetera. I don’t think a perfect system can or does exist, and maybe professional jurists or judges who are accountable for biases that they show is a better way of going about it. But the invective against “Entrusting twelve random idiots” cited from in the o.p. is quite evidently wrong.
I know people critical of the jury system like to present a high profile case where the jury ‘obviously’ got the decision wrong, e.g. the murder trial of O.J. Simpson, but it is really easy to watch the news highlights and see the obvious culpability of Simpson and assume that the jury were just a bunch of morons that ignored evidence, but if you actually delve into the trial and read the transcripts, you can see what a fundamentally terrible job the prosecution did in putting forth their argument and how the jury basically didn’t have any choice but to conclude that there was reasonably doubt in the evidence and testimony about the investigation such that they couldn’t justify a guilty verdict. Juries more often convict an innocent person because of poor defense, shoddy evidence that isn’t adequately challenged, and forced confessions, but I’m not convinced that a judge or a panel of jurists would be able to consistently see through a bad defense and overzealous prosecution, either.
Isn’t this assuming that the jury is a randomly selected collection of your peers? In reality, the jury selection process allows both the defense and prosecution to try and stack the deck as much as possible in their side’s favor. If you have a public defender, you may already be at a distinct disadvantage here.
This is a common lay person’s misunderstanding. Many public defenders know more about criminal law, the judges, their court practices and preferences than their more highly paid private defense counterparts. They don’t have time to hand-hold, but a lot of them do a better job than the paid ones.
Did I misquote you somehow or change the meaning of your words? If not (and I don’t believe i did), then no, I will respond in the manner of my choosing.
Not really. Judges area there to guard against this. Both sides will be trying to gain an advantage, but judges know how to keep things even, for the most part.
One thing worth mentioning is that highly publicized cases with unjust outcomes are exactly why they are news. Cases that go as they are meant to are rarely covered. It creates a skewed perspective of how the jury process works. For the most part, it works well.
You broke it into fragments to respond to each part independently of the context of the full sentence. That makes it awkward to respond coherently and results in a bunch of nonsensical back-and-forth as posts continue to be more fragmented. The sentences you responded to were not inordinately long or run-on sentences with multiple separate concepts. Please do me and others the courtesy of quoting full sentences instead of chopping them into fragments.