Yes, this is indeed going round in circles. All I can say (again) is that I’m not arguing for a system which lets people walk free when they haven’t proven to break the law, and if you think I do, then you haven’t read my arguments.
The one thing I was hoping to get clarification on is whether you honestly hold that a system, any system, as long as it works according to its rules, is morally justified. Sometimes it seems you do—in the Friday hypothetical, e.g.—sometimes you don’t—regarding the Nuremberg trials finding the Nazis to be guilty, while according to their system, their actions were entirely within the law, or in the case of pot laws, apparently. But you seem intent on dodging the issue.
I believe the moral failure comes with the setup of such a system, not the operation of it.
So, the Nazi government was colossally immoral, but that immorality did not specifically manifest itself by not arresting and convicting Hitler.
That I personally consider pot being illegal, and punishing people for using it, to be wrong doesn’t, and shouldn’t, bind anyone else to thinking that. It’s a judgement for society as a whole, and one that is fairly quickly changing to the way I think. That doesn’t make any individual judge or jury who find someone guilty of it morally wrong. I’m quite pleased any time a jury nullifies on this issue though, it’s their right and a useful part of the system to prevent against unjust laws.
The thing is, despite what you seem to keep claiming, there is not some overarching objective morality, some factual definition of what’s right and wrong. Morality is ultimately a personal thing, and laws in a particular society will be an attempt to find a consensus on what is considered moral by the members thereof (at least in a functioning democracy).
You are repeatedly claiming that it’s possible the jury made the wrong decision in this trial, and the only way I can understand that is that you think they had the opportunity to convict someone that you believe is morally guilty but chose not to take it. There are two reasons they could choose not to convict, either they did not consider the evidence proved guilt beyond reasonable doubt, or they did but felt the law that made the action illegal was so wrong they nullified. Ultimately, neither can be considered a morally wrong action, in my opinion.
So, ultimately, I don’t believe a jury can wrongly acquit, no. They have, in practice, the right to acquit no matter what, and the responsibility to do so if unconvinced of guilt or the morality of the law.
The only way their decision could be wrong is that they saw evidence that proved the murder was committed, believe that the law against murder is a just law, and acquitted anyway, for whatever reason. I’m not saying this never happens, but I have no reason to think it applies in this case, or that it’s a regular occurrence.
Ultimately, you don’t get to decide for everyone else what is or isn’t right. Neither do I. It must be a consensus, and the best way to achieve that at present is through a system of laws written by democratically elected representatives, acting honourably, in the interests of their constituents. Of course, it doesn’t always happen like that, but that’s failure in the system you could point to and I’d agree with you.
TL;DR version - a jury can’t, in any meaningful sense, “wrongfully acquit”.
It can also be a moral failure to keep an unjust system operating, or be complicit in its operation.
But certainly, arresting and convicting Hitler is the morally right thing to do.
But that’s a far cry from your original position, which was that nobody can reasonably consider what a jury does to be wrong.
I’m neither believing nor arguing it does. But it can make the fact that somebody was convicted morally wrong—again, these are two different things.
Well, this is a philosophical issue of some contention, but thankfully, not one we need to enter into here.
That’s just it—as an attempt to find this consensus, they will, in general, be imperfect, and necessitate revision; but such revision is impossible if you forbid people from voicing their disagreement by, for instance, arguing that it’s not possible for a jury verdict to be wrong, and that thus anybody arguing to that effect is making meaningless statements. It is exactly this sort of questioning that is at the very bottom of the always ongoing consensus-finding project, and by attempting to stifle it, you rob the whole thing of its foundations.
Again, I’m not faulting the jury—as far as I know, they may have acted entirely within the confines of the justice system, though personally, given the evidence I know, I likely would have decided differently. All I’m doing is pointing out the possibility that even if everything went according to proper procedure, this does not automatically guarantee that the verdict is just, as evidenced by the existence of immoral systems necessarily leading to unjust verdicts while functioning perfectly. Hence, yes, it is possible to question the verdict.
Not under the present system, which I do consider a mostly reasonable one, but in general, it’s also possible that going along with an immoral system means that you are guilty yourself. Again, I raise this just as an option, not as something directly applicable to the present case, to highlight the questionability of jury verdicts.
You have to make a distinction here. A jury may be well within the law in acquitting a happily confessing baby-killer because they think baby-killing is hoity-toity, and thus nullify. Regarding their act, since they acted within the law, it’s perfectly justified by the laws, and since it’s moral to act according to the law (to a first approximation, at any rate—see the above qualification), they acted morally. But that doesn’t make it right that the baby-killer walked, that is, that doesn’t imply that the verdict is a just one. This simply doesn’t follow, because those two things are on separate levels.
Take the example of the scientific method Trinopus introduced. A flawed method may fail to discover the underlying reality, and thus, pronounce the nonexistence of, say, atoms, when atoms in fact exist. Now, the scientists announcing the nonecistence of atoms are not doing anything wrong—their work is perfectly justified by the method they use. But that doesn’t change the fact that atoms exist. Again, these are two different levels, and you judge one by means of the other, which leads to confusion.
The problem is that in the case of criminal justice, both judgments are qualitatively similar: the jury may have acted correctly/within the system or not, and the accused may have acted morally or not. This leads you to conclude that since the jury acted correctly, their finding that the accused did likewise, must also be correct. It’s more transparent in the case of the scientific method that this need not be the case, because there we have an unambiguous existence statement at the bottom, which turns out to be false, despite the correct actions of the scientists involved.
The fact that the underlying morality is something far less set in stone than (presumably) physical reality (if it is; it’s at least abstractly possible that there’s a universal set of moral values that we’ll discover one day, though I don’t hold my breath) doesn’t change this conclusion. The problem is a logical one, that the correctness of the actions of those implementing the system does not strictly imply the correctness of their findings. It simply doesn’t follow.
Well, and I wouldn’t want to. But I do get to question; in fact, I consider it a responsibility to question when I see something that I can’t square with my sense of morality. As I said, this is the very base of the process of consensus-finding described above.
Well, I disagree. Just like scientists can come to a wrong conclusion by perfectly following their method, if the method itself is flawed, a jury can acquit wrongfully in the sense that the person they acquit may nevertheless be guilty. You take me for arguing that the jury in acquitting a guilty person necessarily must have acted wrongly, but I’m not; the two are separate issues.
Of course, there is also a whole set of safeguards in place for cases in which the jury reached the wrong verdict for other reasons—procedural errors, etc., leading to appeals—which I don’t think is relevant here; but this just demonstrates that even the system itself doesn’t hold that ‘juries can’t wrongfully acquit/convict’.
Besides, do you hold the converse to be true, that juries also can’t wrongfully convict?
I don’t have time to answer your post in full now, but I’ll just reply to this. I do think juries can wrongfully convict, because as I’ve said the system is intentionally (and rightly, I believe) set up to strongly favour the defendant.
Thankyou for an interesting discussion, by the way.
I find that hard to square with what you’ve said before. It seems that now, you’re acknowledging the possibility of system-independent ‘standards’ (using somewhat loose verbiage here) against which a verdict can be evaluated. But then, it seems that you can’t a priori exclude the possibility of a wrong acquittal—you may hold that in the current system, such a thing doesn’t occur (though I’d think that hard to argue for), but in other systems, that is not necessarily the case.
So why is it that in the Friday-rule system, which I set up as a transparent example of a system realizing that possibility, you consider the verdict to be just? (Again, here, I’m not asking whether the jury acted correctly or not, but whether the fact that a Friday-killer goes free while a Thursday-killer doesn’t is morally defensible.)
It is morally the only correct decision to let the Friday Killer go free, as what he did was not illegal. If you want to make an argument that a law that would convict the Thursday Killer but not the Friday Killer is unjust, and therefore a jury should nullify and not convict the Thursday Killer, I could see that. Arbitrary laws are generally bad.
It is far more important that legally innocent people are not convicted that that morally guilty people are. You can’t separate this from the law, because it is the fact that his actions are legal that would make punishing the Friday Killer immoral and unjust.
And now I’ll try to respond to this in more detail.
Yes, certainly, if the system is wrong one should try to change it. But that doesn’t include punishing people who have not committed a crime.
What for? It would be morally wrong to have arrested and convicted him for having sill facial hair. There needs to be an actual, provable crime.
I’ve not said that, I’ve said it’s hard to see how an acquittal by a jury can be wrong, short of capriciously acquitting someone they know to be guilty, and agree has done wrong.
I’ve not argued otherwise… I’m talking about acquittals, not convictions. They are not equivalent opposites. Acquittal - that is, a finding that the defendant is not guilty - is the default result, that can only be overturned by extremely compelling proof.
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That’s just it—as an attempt to find this consensus, they will, in general, be imperfect, and necessitate revision; but such revision is impossible if you forbid people from voicing their disagreement by, for instance, arguing that it’s not possible for a jury verdict to be wrong, and that thus anybody arguing to that effect is making meaningless statements. It is exactly this sort of questioning that is at the very bottom of the always ongoing consensus-finding project, and by attempting to stifle it, you rob the whole thing of its foundations.
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That is another huge misunderstanding of what I’ve been arguing. If laws are wrong, they are subject to change going forward. That doesn’t change the morality or justness of a previous acquittal, although it may do of a conviction - see the recent pardon of Alan Turing for a good example of that.
I am not claiming all verdict ever by any system are just. What I am claiming is that if a correct judgement by the standards of an unjust or immoral system is handed down, it is not that judgement that is unjust, but the system, and it is the system that needs changing.
What often happens in unjust systems is that judgements that are not correct by the rules of the system are handed out and allowed to stand, due to corruption or blatant evil on the part of judges. That is unjust.
A judge that consistently and fairly rules by the standards of an immoral system is not, himself, unjust, and neither are his judgements - but they may be considered immoral.
As I’ve repeatedly argued, not in the case of an acquittal, no - assuming the jury is following the system and not acting capriciously. If you do not believe in guilt beyond reasonable doubt, or you believe the law is immoral, the only correct thing to do is acquit. It is simply not possible for an acquittal, correctly following the rules of the system, to be immoral or unjust.
It absolutely does follow that it’s just. In that scenario, for whatever reason, it is considered that baby-killing is not wrong, and therefore to convict someone of it would be wrong. Again, you are appealing to some overall morality, which does not exist. At least, that’s a premise for my arguments, and as you said earlier, not an argument you wish to get into.
The argument you’ve used does have a real-world similarity, by the way, although not usually of babies, and that’s euthanasia, or mercy-killing. Juries have actually let people off who are factually guilty of a crime in these circumstances, and by following their consciences have acted both morally and justly.
If you think the scientific method can be used to determine the underlying truth of existence, you misunderstand it. It can be used to provide models to predict future events, of greater or lesser accuracy, but it doesn’t pretend to reveal truth. If a model that doesn’t use atoms works better - that is, has greater predictive accuracy - then it is more correct than the previous one.
Again, you look for absolutes where there are none. Absolutes only exist in logic and mathematics, and my contention is that it’s a logical argument that a jury cannot wrongly acquit if it follows the rules.
No again, that’s not what I’m saying. The jury does not find someone innocent - that is, they do not judge that the defendant acted morally. They find someone guilty or not - that is, in your terms and assuming perfect law, they find whether it is proven that they acted immorally. It is presumed that they are innocent, which includes presuming that they acted morally.
Your understanding of the scientific method and the nature of existence is flawed, I’m afraid, but I’ve already kinda addressed this.
Again, though, I’m not claiming that every action by a jury or a court is necessarily correct, only every acquittal. With the caveat that I’m presuming the jury acted rationally, but as part of the system is not to question why a jury decides a certain way (in that, an appeal court can’t ask jurors why they decided, not that we can’t discuss it here), so an acquittal can’t be justly reversed.
I can’t square having a problem with a jury acquitting someone who’s not been proved to break the law being immoral. I am also assuming that, as a general rule, juries are not acquitting people they believe to be proven guilty, and when they do it’s because they believe the law is wrong. In which case an acquittal is also morally right.
Please, give me an example of where a jury acquitting someone when there’s insufficient evidence could be immoral or unjust.
That is not wrong. It is absolutely, unequivocally not wrong for the jury to acquit in that circumstance. If the method is flawed, change the method, don’t remove the safeguards that protect us all.
As I’ve repeatedly said, it is far more important to prevent innocent people being punished than to punish the guilty.
So you are arguing that a decision may be just but immoral, in an immoral system. Sounds like a difference that makes no difference, insofar as its outrage to basic decency is concerned.
I’ll admit that I was not on the jury and didn’t hear all of the evidence, but the video tape seems like stunning evidence of guilt. I would love to see the other evidence that got these guys an acquittal because at first blush it seems like clearly excessive force.
Again, this is a level confusion. Lawful does not imply moral.
But regarding pot smokers, you clearly weren’t talking abou misconvictions of legally inncent people—if according to the law, pot smokers are criminals, then by your argumentation, it would be the only morally correct choice to convict them. So, what is a misconviction: if somebody innocent by the letter of the law is convicted, or if somebody morally innocent is convicted?
If you argue that there are wrong convictions, but no wrong acquittals, then of course the justice system you should argue for is one that always acquits, as it would never do anything wrong. No?
Still, the wrong way round. It is the fact that the Friday killer’s actions are immoral that makes the law, and the verdict based on it, unjust.
But it’s a fact that Nazi criminals were punished for their war crimes, no? And, in my opinion, quite justly so. This again despite the fact that under their system, their actions were legal.
The thing is, it’s not the law that makes something a crime that is logically prior, but the morality that makes something wrong, which we then codify in legislation. So there needs not first be a provable crime, but a morally wrong action whose wrongness is then—consequently—codified into law. This again no matter whether there is an absolute morality or not.
Then again, the best system is the one that always acquits.
Not under the current system, no. But that’s still thinking on the wrong level. One can easily imagine a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ system under which the roles of acquittals and convictions were reversed. You would consider such a system faulty—but notice that you do so by applying your external moral judgment that acquittals are never wrong to the system, which is the same process I use to arrive at my suspicion that the verdict against the accused in the Thomas case was wrong.
But again, the Nuremberg trials are a good example where a previous acquittal—implicitly, by never being accused—was overturned, because clearly, there were moral concerns that necessitated action.
But the purpose of these judgments, ultimately, is to uncover what is morally right; the notions of morality are codified in the system of law. Reaching an immoral judgment is exactly the failure of the system I have been talking about.
Which, again, leads to the only admissible system being one that always acquits.
But if you require the nonexistence of an objective morality, then you have a quite weak position, it seems to me, since the applicability of your arguments depends on the metaphysical makeup of the world—which to me can’t really be a good basis for a justice system, as regarding most of this makeup, we have ultimately no idea what’s correct.
Yes, you’re right, there’s a gap between the epistemic judgments of the scientific method and the ontological constituents of the world. I was simplifying, since the discussion otherwise goes too far astray. For present purposes, we can simply assume a scientific realism that recognises the force of Putnam’s 'no miracles-argument, meaning that those theoretical entities exist which are indispensable to our best theories, and that those theories describe reality, since otherwise, scientific success would be miraculous. This has a sufficiently broad standing in the philosophy of science that we can consider the rest as details.
No, I’m not looking for absolutes; the problem is one of logical implication. Judgments made on one level do not carry over to the lower one—judgments of correct procedure on the level of the justice system do not imply judgments of moral righteousness on the underlying level of morality, whether or not that morality is absolute, historical, social, evolutionary, or arbitrarily determined. It simply needs to be determined somehow at some given point in time.
Well, I guess I’ll readily accept that for the latter item—and if you understand the nature of existence, please explain it to me.
Well, again, assume a system that acquits everybody: is every acquittal then still morally right?
I’m not, and never have been, calling for anybody to be convicted with insufficient evidence.
But this must be checked, or otherwise, we do indeed end up with an all-acquittals system. Carrying out your philosophy of ‘no acquittal is unjust’ simply leads to anarchy (and anarchy simply leads back to the system we have, or something like it, since that’s where we started).
this is a circular discussion. It’s simple. jurists should have the capacity to reason through facts. Merely being picked does not ensure this ability. A professional jurist panel would greatly improve the accuracy of verdicts.
Based on what I just viewed in that video and the misc. knowledge I possess of the law, I think I just witnessed a murder.
Here’s why. In Indiana a couple months ago, three teenagers were convicted of murder by trial. They were in the midst of a home invasion with a fourth friend of theirs when the home-owner shot and killed this fourth friend. By law in Indiana, if someone dies in the process of you committing a felony, you are guilty of murder. These young men, 17-23 I think, are now going to spend the rest of their lives in prison because the DA wanted to make an example out of them.
Even though these cops were “just doing their jobs,” and not committing a felony, how can it be justified that their actions resulted in the death of an individual and it’s not murder? Cops are supposed to be trained in the art of handcuffing and detaining people, they shouldn’t have to kill someone to do it. Especially not over theft.
It may have just been the snipped version of the video I saw, but the first cop seemed to have caused the escalation with a power-trip. In my experience, as soon as a cop has enough reason to detain, arrest you, or just make you do something in general, their authority-ego swells. Kelly Thomas had a point when asking the cop, “why are you playing games?” The cop seemed irritated and aggressive about the fact that Thomas would not do exactly as asked. The cop was cussing and being antagonistic, which isn’t part of his job. His aggression seemed to confuse Thomas (not doing the things he was asked exactly and immediately and asking “why are you playing games”) which caused the cop to begin the physical confrontation. The cop should have been decisive in his actions, not engaging in a back-and-forth “do what I say!” battle.
It seemed kind of careless on the cops part. A vast majority of homeless people are mentally ill and/or severe drug-addicts. Every cop should possess the ability to properly handle vagrants and those cops should have been able to not kill the man in their attempt to detain/arrest.
I have never said it does. I have repeatedly said that the conviction of someone for a legal act is an immoral act. The morality of the original, legal act is irrelevant, it’s the morality of acquittal or conviction I’m talking about.
Again, I’ve repeatedly answer this. Convictions and acquittals are not equal, they are not two sides of the same coin. It does not follow that, because it’s immoral to convict someone who’s legally innocent, in is therefore immoral to acquit someone who’s legally guilty. I’ve never said that, I don’t believe that, and it’s not a logical consequence of my other beliefs. It is, ultimately, a straw man argument.
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No.
You are again assuming something. That is, that because the law is unjust, all verdicts based on it are unjust. That, again, is false, because as I’ve repeatedly said, a foundation of any just system is that acquitting someone who’s not legally guilty is more important than convicting someone who is morally guilty.
You still, for whatever reason, want to blame the courts for the errors of the lawmakers. I don’t know why you keep conflating the two, or what you intend to show by doing it.
And to reply to your other post, you seem to be saying that, if I say “no acquittal is unjust”, then that means “no conviction can be just”. I’m not. I’m not actually saying either. I’ve said that no acquittal where the jury acts correctly, that is acquitting either because they believe the evidence doesn’t prove the crime, or that the crime is not a moral wrong, and so should not be illegal, can be unjust.
It follows that, when neither of these conditions are met, the jury should convict, and it is just and right that they should do so.
Now, juries make mistakes. Like every other part of a system, they are flawed, and human parts of a system are more flawed than most other parts - hence the need for strong protections from those mistakes. Which is why if a jury mistakenly believes that there is proof beyond reasonable doubt, their verdict can be overturned either by the judge or by a later appeal judge. Again, as acquittal and conviction are not balanced opposites, no mechanism should exist to overturn an acquittal - else you get the disgusting farce that’s been happening to Amanda Knox, to pick a current example.
So no, it should not be the case that convictions never happen. But they should be rare compared to accusations. Only a minority of times someone is accused of a crime should it even go to trial, and that when the evidence is already compelling. But the default should remain a strong presumption of innocence, to be overturned if and only if there is proof beyond reasonable doubt of legal guilt, and a belief by the jury in moral guilt also. Even with that system plenty of criminals get caught and convicted.
But we’ve invented a way around double jeopardy. We retry murderers in a civil trial for basically the same crime with a little lipstick applied. The rules are relaxed as are the penalties.
I still don’t get where you get the ‘blame the courts’ part from. That’s not what I’m talking about. At all. I’ve repeatedly said that in, say, the Friday hypothetical, I believe that the court acts perfectly defensibly in acquitting somebody who killed on a Friday. I simply don’t consider it morally right that a person is acquitted just because they killed on a Friday.
I mean, do you honestly not see the difference here? I’m not condemning the action, but its outcome; not those that acted, but what their act resulted in. It is possible to act perfectly correctly, and nevertheless have the outcome be a bad one. Ancient Greek literature is full of case studies.
No, and again I wonder where you got this from. But you did say that convictions may be unjust, so the system in which there are no convictions, only acquittals, since those, according to you, are always just, is the only possible perfectly just system. Why would you convict anybody if an acquittal is always just? It may well be that a conviction is just, as well, but convicting always runs the risk of injustice.
Logically, the argument does not need as a premise that ‘no convictions can be just’, but only ‘some convictions are unjust’, since that’s the correct negation of ‘all convictions are just’.
In a system that always acquits, the jury would be acting correctly in always acquitting, so it would be the perfect system. How could you prefer any other system?
I think here it’s clear that you still argue from within the system to talk about the system; you refer to ‘reasonable doubt’ or things like that when you should be consider general justice systems, to which the concepts are not necessarily applicable. That is, you use the standards of the system to judge itself, but that is circular; you need to take into account the larger moral backdrop from whence the system springs forth, only there can its verdicts find ultimate justification (which doesn’t assume moral absolutism). In failing to do so, you ultimately end up biting your own tail.
This is why you are tempted to consider it morally right to acquit the Friday killer: the system’s rules, applied to itself, leave this as the only possible course of action, and since it judges those actions to be right, the acquittal must be right, too. But it’s not. The snake is just eating its own tail. Take a step out of the system, and it becomes clear that it’s morally wrong to let the Friday killer go free.
This despite the jury acting correctly, despite the court being blameless. It’s just that the implication you would like to draw from correct action within the system to moral righteousness beyond it isn’t sound, and from this larger perspective, yes, the acquittal of the Friday killer is wrong. Not from the inside view, no; but that’s not what I’m saying. The relevant perspective for such a judgment is that of the wider moral context not that of the technical functioning of the system according to its rules.
All the talk about the asymmetry between acquittals and convictions, reasonable doubt, distinction between court and lawmaker etc., is within-system talk, and inappropriate for situations in which the system itself is what is to be evaluated, by means of the verdicts it produces. Again, the system may fail to do what we want it to do. Why else would we ever change it?
It may be the case that it produces a wrong verdict, whether acquittal or conviction, by simply not producing the judgment appropriate to the moral value of the act committed. And this may be the case in the Kelly Thomas case (though I’m not necessarily convinced it is; I think there are far more mundane explanations). That doesn’t mean I’m calling for a re-trial, for the conviction of people without sufficient evidence, or any of those things you seem to read into my posts.
It simply means that it may be the case that the verdict reached was wrong, and perhaps, as has happened so very often before, we should change the system. This always occurs due to the belief that verdicts produced by the system are wrong, and something should be done about that. But this can only be understood if it is, in fact, possible for the system’s verdicts to be wrong.
I’m at a loss as to how to explain it any more clearly. If you want to again answer this by stating something along the lines that ‘only convictions can be wrong’, please reconsider. Even if within the system, it is never wrong to acquit, because in doubt, judge in favour of the accused, this doesn’t mean that an acquittal is morally right. Somebody killing somebody else and not having to face consequences is morally wrong, even if his guilt can’t be established beyond reasonable doubt. Of course, if its guilt can’t be so established, then the only morally permissible action is to let him go free. But the fact that he goes free itself is morally wrong.
Try to imagine a god’s eye view, a position of omniscience from which you impartially view the whole affair. You know the killer is guilty, and you also know that the court has no way of establishing this. So, he walks, which is the only moral way for the court to act; but he also faces no consequences for his actions, which is unjust. These two things are not in contradiction, because they are not on the same level. You, from your god’s eye perspective, could punish the killer, and it would be morally right to do so. It would be just. These are simply different levels, and you must keep them apart, or you tangle yourself up in circular reasoning.
But of course, a jury can also mistakenly believe that there is reasonable doubt, if an argument has been presented that establishes with logical necessity the guilt of the accused, but the jury as a whole failed to understand it. The jury is here just as mistaken as if they mistakenly thought that guilt was established ‘beyond reasonable doubt’.
I guess I simply disagree with you that it’s possible to take a god’s eye view, that there is such a thing as a certain knowable truth even in theory, and that there is an absolute morality that can be applied.
I don’t bring up presumption of innocence, beyond reasonable doubt and so forth because they are part of the system, I believe that they are good moral positions and that, because of their morality, they have become part of the system.
So, it is morally wrong and unjust to punish someone if there is reason to doubt their guilt. There is, ultimately, no absolute, objective truth about it in any meaningful sense, there is only what we can discover, and we can and should act only on that.
As for the Friday killer, you may be right in saying that it’s unjust that killing is allowed on Fridays, but it is not unjust that someone who kills on Friday when it’s legal is not punished. Punishing them would be the injustice.
I basically agree with all of this. However, in practical terms, no one has a “god’s eye view.” I don’t, you don’t, the judge doesn’t, the jury members don’t, the legislature sure all hell doesn’t (those rice-bags? They can’t see beyond the next fund-raising dinner!)
So…we have to flog along with an imperfect system, because perfection is forever beyond our reach. This means the occasional result that we don’t feel is right. This one is yours. You’ve just got to accept it.
(Or, alternately, you could actually propose a revision, but, so far, you’ve been careful to avoid that.)
Magiver: I worry that professional jurors might become as contrived and corrupted as professional “expert witnesses” are today. They would become outcome-oriented, goal-driven, and rewarded by their record.
There was an old Tumbleweeds cartoon I’m fond of: the judge tells the sheriff to round up a jury. The sheriff asks, “Do you want the convicting jury, or the acquitting jury?” The judge says, “Whose turn is it?”
I’m worried that professional jurors would come to have “tough on crime” or “protects the rights of the accused” banners on their web sites. It’s bad enough when judges run for office on such platforms. Jurors? I think it’s a bad idea.