# Trial by jury **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 12, 2010, 3:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trial-by-jury/524665 "2010-01-12T15:50:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![TokyoBayer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tokyobayer/32/13989_2.png) [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2010, 2:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trial-by-jury/524665/41 "2010-01-14T14:58:29Z")
Until Japan adopted a jury system (with members called “lay judges”), it had a conviction rate in the upper 90 percentages with trials being conducted by judges only. That’s insane. Essentially, the prosecutor was replacing the jury in determining guilt. If the prosecutor thought a person was guilty, they would take it to trial, with judges rubber stamping the decision. Many people were unjustly convicted only on the basis of forced confessions. Many people charged with lesser crimes would face enormous pressure to “settle” with the victim, paying them off in return for dropped charges. In face of pressure from human rights groups, just this last year Japan has introduced a system with lay members. We’ll have to wait to see if this will help relieve part of the abysmal state of Japanese justice. For now, the jury is still out. ---
**Author:** ![AK84](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85e7bf/32.png) [@AK84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AK84)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2010, 3:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trial-by-jury/524665/42 "2010-01-14T15:43:01Z")
Or prosecutors were only taking forward cases where they were certain they would get a conviction. Such statistics are meaningless. ---
**Author:** ![DragonAsh](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/db5fbb/32.png) [@DragonAsh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DragonAsh)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2010, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trial-by-jury/524665/43 "2010-01-14T17:00:18Z")
Mild nit-pick: Japan is not using a jury system - it has six ‘lay judges’ and three ‘professoinal judges’ - and the three judges can over-ride the verdict of the lay judges. Only in Japan could this kind of sweeping change to its judicial system by introduced with zero input from the populace at large. The lay judges have to be over the age of 20, and have to have completed secondary education (which, now that I think about it, probably isn’t a bad requirement…). Lay judges are allowed to directly question the defendant - I’m still torn as to whether this is a good idea or not. I’m very happy to see this system introduced in Japan, however - Japan’s judicial system is positively ancient in how it operates, from the glacial speed at which cases proceed, to how Japan’s existing lawyers actively work to restrict the number of new lawyers coming into the system, to the implicit and explicit cooperation between the police and prosecutors, to the refusal of the police to video tape interrogations/confessions, to the widely-held believe that someone not confessing to a crime isn’t ‘not guilty’, but ‘guilty and not contrite’, and thus should be subject to an even harsher punishment. Check out a movie, ‘Soredemo boku wa yattenai’ (I Just Didn’t Do It), to see an all-too-real picture of how Japan’s judicial system works. ---
**Author:** ![Noel\_Prosequi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/b19c9b/32.png) [@Noel\_Prosequi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Noel_Prosequi)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2010, 8:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trial-by-jury/524665/44 "2010-01-15T08:42:31Z")
> [@AK84](#): > > Excellent analysis. But a few points > > 1. THe major common law system where the Jury trial was abandoned in favour of the trial by bench or judge are the sucessor states of British India (I think Pakistan was the last holdout until the 70’s) have not seen the effects that you say would occur if a jury trial was abandoned. You said lawyers would try to get a judge who is more favourable, well we do that any way and as shown in S Asia, the old adage; a judge can alway be appealed against, holds true and is a stabilising factor. Even if you get a hanging judge, well when he hands down a verdict he has to give his reasons and those reasons will be shot to bits at appeal. > > 2. The bit about appeal not being a rerun is true and would hold true (and does in the relevant juridictions) even if you had a bench trial. In an appeal, you must convince the court that the lower forum made an error of law, or fact or the action lacked procedural propriety or the court failed to take into account something. > > At present in criminal appeals, the Appellants pour over the trial transcripts and sometimes pull something literally out of a hat. > > 1. You mention children and women being unreliable witnesses (and for children I would agree, although it depends on case to case), well jurys are worse, they misunderstand forensic evidence, jumping to conclusions not merited by the evidence and often trusting unreliable witnesses. Don’t even get me started on identification evidence and how jurys make a meal of that. > > 2. As experience has show in jurisdictions where jury trials have been abandoned, the conviction rates have gone up, but the rate of people going to trial has dropped, judges are far less forgiving of prosecutions attempting to bring cases where there is doubt then jurys. > > Professionally, I enjoy jury trials, and enjoy conducting them. But to say that it is the best system, when it mainfestly is wrong headed in my opinion. To **Pleonast** , I work in Australia, but I also teach in Malaysia, which has a judge-only system with English DNA. And to **AK84** , I too like doing jury trials. My point about judge shopping is not that it doesn’t happen anyway, but that pleas of guilty or not will skew the statistics, making them unreliable indicators of the outcome. I am unconvinced that a hanging judge will have his verdicts shot to bits, as you say. Experience suggests that judges become adept at appeal proofing - saying the right things, articulating the tests correctly but doing what they want. Judges at the other end of the spectrum do that too. Fact finding is hard to overturn on appeal, remember. My point about women and children was not that they are more unreliable than others. It was that judges can develop a micro-culture in which such silliness can become elevated to the level of received wisdom, and I was using that as an example. And finally I agree that conviction rates are a poor measure of the success of the system for the reasons I mentioned in my post above - second guessing by counsel including prosecutors distorts the meaning of the numbers. The same is true of numbers of cases taken to trial. And I have to add, having talked to lawyers who have worked in Japan, that system is too weird for me to even think about commenting on. The role of the prosecutor in getting confessions, the power they have - it just has too many pointy bits to fit comfortably inside my head. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/trial-by-jury/524665.md?page=2)