Some of the comments in this thread made me think about the practice of jury trials. You’re basically putting the fate of the defendant in the hands of a group of people who don’t have (and from the look of it, must not have) any legal knowledge, and you end up calling that fact, as some posters in that thread did.
Also, from what I’ve seen on different shows, the whole deal about “The jury will disregard the witness’s last statement” remains mysterious to me. Why does the jury have to be protected against anything that happens in a court room?
I profess profound ignorance of the inner workings of the US system, and what I do know I learned from The Wire and such, so I may be way off on some of my assertions. Maybe someone can enlighten me why this convoluted process is better than a team of three judges, all of whom have studied the law for all their lives, determining guilt and punishment based on “fact” and other circumstances, which apparently the jury is forbidden to take into account.
Mods, not sure if this borders GQ or even GD territory, please move as you see fit.
IANAL, but the reasoning behind a jury trial is to provide an extra layer of protection for the accused. If the judges are appointed by government officials, and can be removed by the same government officials, they may have direct or indirect pressure placed on them to decide cases in favor of the government.
We can all think of examples of totalitarian regimes where the judges and courts were mere puppets of the people in power.
Having an impartial jury reduces some of the risk of this type of situation occuring.
Juries are actually pretty good at achieving rough justice. They generally take their responsibilities seriously, and–as a group–usually act rationally. There are, of course, exceptions. Same is true of judges. Some are great, many good, some awful. I’ve had juries do things that I didn’t like, but rarely have I seen them make a decision that didn’t make any sense. I can’t say the same for judges.
In reaching a decision, jurors don’t have to worry about the next election, or their next job.
Some cases I prefer not to have a jury. Many* cases, both criminal and civil, are tried to a judge. . Not that* many, actually. If one side doesn’t want a jury, the other side usually will…
It’s true that most jurors don’t have legal knowledge. In a lot of states, being a lawyer used to be an automatic disqualification from jury service, in fact, though this has been relaxed in recent times. But that’s by design: juries are not charged with making legal decisions, the judge is. The jury’s job is to interpret the facts of the case.
The jury’s job is to look at the facts of the case and decide if the defendant is guilty, and if so, what they are guilty of. At trial, certain things are relevant to the case and certain things aren’t. Forensic evidence linking the defendant to a vending machine robbery is relevant. The defendant’s mother’s opinions about Joe Biden probably are not, so such things will be excluded or stricken from the record.
There is also the issue of things being prejudicial. If a person is on trial for arson, the fact that he was arrested 20 years ago for jaywalking is probably not relevant to the case. It’s the judge’s job to decide what is relevant and what is not, and to prevent the jury from hearing irrelevant material that may prejudice them.
There is also the issue of excluded evidence. If some evidence was gathered by investigators in a way that violated the defendant’s rights; such as a search without a proper warrant where there was no probable cause, the judge will prevent that evidence from being introduced at trial, and make sure that the prosecution does not attempt to base its arguments on any excluded evidence. The jury must only be exposed to evidence that was permitted.
Finally there is the controversial issue of nullification. A jury may decide that the facts of the case indisputably prove that the defendant is guilty. But they don’t like the law under which he was convicted and decide to find him not guilty anyway. This serves as a final check on government power in criminal prosecutions. (And it’s worth noting that the only people who argue vociferously against this practice, as rare as it is, are lawyers.)
No, the juries only consider facts. The judges consider matters of law. The right to a jury trial is the defendant’s; if he wants to make a primarily legal (rather than factual) argument, he can elect to have a bench trial instead, in which case there is no jury and the judge decides the verdict. Jury trials are far more common because you usually have a better chance with a factual argument and jurors who may be persuaded by rhetoric.
This is an excellent answer to the question. I’ll try to explain things more fully.
The jury is often called the “trier of fact,” since that’s what its job is. Jury members need no legal knowledge, because all they do is decide whether the facts presented as evidence during the trial add up to a verdict of guilt. If the jury decides that they do, the judge (the “trier of law”) takes over and applies the law to the verdict; if the jury decides that they do not, the defendant walks.
Think of a US trial (or indeed, any trial in a jurisdiction using a common-law adversarial system of justice, such as is found in the UK, Australia, Canada, etc.) as a two-part question:
Do the facts presented as evidence establish guilt or not? This is the jury’s question to answer.
If they establish guilt, what does the law say to do about it? This is the judge’s question to answer.
As for the question of why we have juries, it’s because England does. The reason why they have juries involves a long history of annoyed noblemen and kings getting their heads chopped off.
It isn’t always intuitive but what the jury is supposed to do is decide the facts. Did he have a gun, did he shoot the victime, was the defendant negligent, etc.
Any legal arguments are decided by the judge ahead of time. By the time that the case gets to the jury, the issues are factual and usually boil down to whose version of the story do you believe.
Before trial, the attorneys have worked on a set of jury instructions. The court will rule on any instructions that are disputed. Most of the instructions are standardized and explain what the rules are in easier to understand language.
Statements like “the jury will disregard the witness’s last statement” are uncommon. Usually these issues are decided ahead of time. We have rules of evidence which may bar certain pieces of evidence. The reasons that they are barred can be because they are hearsay, because they aren’t probative, or that the prejudicial value may outweigh the probative value.
It is indeed a sick system with jury of today. In the 1700’s it may have been as good as could be done in absence of all the science we now have. But why do we keep it? We would not want medical methods from the 1700’s nor to eat in a place that used the 1700’s sanitation and food prep methods would we? We have lie detectors that work now, we have drugs that can reveal not only the truth, but a list of who all else was involved in a crime, and we will not use it. Everyone pretends we can’t do any better than guessing.
All this because lawyers want to be able to rip off people by keeping the 1700 system and having 12 people guess. Would you want medical care just guessed at in the same way, they did that in the 1700’s. Leaches anyone? Well in this case the leaches are the lawyers. They will do anything to keep the truth from coming out. Excluding evidence is one of the worst abuses of justice ever thought up by legal types.
Lie detectors aren’t foolproof by any means, and I think we’re going to need some names and evidence for this idea of drugs that reveal the truth and who all was involved in a crime.
Most importantly - if lawyers for some reason are so invested in randomly convicting people of crimes (by the way, do prosecutors and defense trade off on who gets to win which case?) then why is DNA testing permissible?
Well, no. If we didn’t exclude evidence from trials, they’d all be 6 months long. Do you really need to hear about a defendant’s student loan default in a reckless driving trial? No. That “evidence” needs to be excluded.
Please tell me more about this. I would like to order some.
Also, please tell me how the use of a jury helps lawyers “rip people off.”
No, we do not. Polygraphy is a fraud, and polygraph results are inadmissible for very good reasons in US courts.
Utter bullshit. There is no such thing as a truth serum.
There’s nothing wrong with making an educated, informed guess based on evidence. That’s how normal people make most every decision in their lives, including judges and juries.
I’ve got bad news for you: the common law system goes back a lot farther than the 18th century, and lawyers have been ripping people off since the ancient Romans.
Lie detectors and other methods should be evidence just as any other. Plenty of wrong eye witness testimony happens yet no one tries to ban that. The people beating lie detectors happens only after long coaching by experts in controlling their feelings, it is not going to happen to street people questioned quickly which should always be the case. If it was so easy to beat, criminals would be begging to try don’t you think? O.J. took one and failed and I guarantee he had coaching and still failed it. Todays equipment is not 50 years agos.
The jury system originates somewhat earlier than that.
The only accurate lie detector ever developed is painstaking investigation, no matter how many Israeli companies manage to con the department of work and pensions into buying voice stress analysers to catch benefit fraudsters. Lie detectors should therefore continue to be excluded on the grounds that they have no evidentiary value.
Ultimately whether twelve people consider evidence sufficient to prove guilt is the best system so far developed.
We have drugs that make people suggestible, but neither polygraphs nor brain scans nor voice stress analysers can determine what is true, nor can torture or drugging or any method known to man be shown to extract truthful statements from an unwilling subject.
Arguably the right to remain silent is the most important of all, as all to often those charged with enforcing the law have felt various forms of abuse to be justified in extracting statements from defendants.
Lie detectors aren’t evidence any more than flipping a coin is evidence, or consulting a fortune teller.
Heavy penalties are to be had for perjury.
Aldrich Ames, for example, whose long coaching by experts consisted of a short conversation with his handler.
I’m inclined to think the evidence rather throws doubt on the common perception that OJ was guilty. Certainly the jury thought so. OR, on the other hand, he may have been a criminal “begging to try it”.
That may just be a by-product of the amount of legal knowledge a judge posesses compared to what you do. Physicists do things that don’t make sense to me, doesn’t mean that they’re incorrect
That’s not what I meant. I’ve served as a judge, and I’ve argued numerous cases to juries and to judges. My point is that the most odd ball decisions I’ve seen have been judges, not juries. Again, the majority of decisions by judges and juries are rational. A few (very few) judges seem to have serious bias or incompetence, which you don’t see in a group of 8 to 12 citizens. (the group dynamics must level things out a bit).
Perhaps Leon497 meant the eyewitness testimony is mistaken, not an intentional lie. In which case, I would think a jury would be beneficial. An eyewitness reports seeing one thing, but the forensics disprove it. The jury needs to decide whether they believe someone firmly convinced of what they saw, or physical evidence. Many “average Americans” seem to be distrustful of science they don’t understand, so the mistaken eyewitness testimony may win out.
IANAL, and have been dismissed from juries every time I’m called because I prefer physical evidence to eyewitness testimony - my eyes have deceived me too many times.
In the legal system, juries are the last bulwark of the citizenry against an overweening state. They can say, “Yes, the accused did transgress that law, but that law is unreasonable. Not Guilty!” or, “Yes, the accused did transgress that law, but the actions were right, necessary, and reasonable. Not Guilty!”