The biggest issue is the whole jury system - I don't understand how being judged by 12 people with no formal law education is considered a working or fair justice system.
Furthermore a jury of your peers is at least as good as the society around it. A jury of self selecting professionals is almost certainly worse. How many people would choose to join the jury profession so they can enact their own personal bullying by voting guilty on everyone? How many people become small town cops because they like having a gun and barking orders?
Furthermore any bias in a juror gets averaged over 12 and affects at most one trial.
Furthermore prosecution and defense get to cross examine and dismiss jurors as part of the selection process. If you want a generally well educated jury you can get one. Ask your trial lawyer which jury is right for you!
Furthermore it only takes one of the 12 to stop a miscarriage of justice.
Furthermore in the US everyone is at least somewhat indoctrinated with an understanding of what a jury is and a respect for executing jury duty faithfully. You have a pretty good shot of getting at least one person on the jury that won't vote guilty instantly so they can still make the baseball game latter that day.
Finally, a jury doesn't need law education. Their job is to judge the facts. They are informed of the definitions of the crime, and the evidence, and must reach a verdict of yes he did this or no he did not. Upon rendering a guilty verdict, the actual law part of the law is executed by the judge.
Why have jurors at all ? Over here in the Netherlands people are judged by ... judges (what's in a name).
Because it limits the power of the state. The state, in the US, does not have absolute power to convict anyone of anything.
In the Netherlands, the state does have that power. That means you have exactly zero chance against a corrupt complaint against you.
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2016/11/20/onschuldig-en-veroordee...
In practice, the police and prosecutor in the Netherlands are both rewarded financially and have an internal culture that glorifies getting convictions. Needless to say, this means they often successfully prosecute innocents, knowing full well what they're doing.
So I guess you can just decide for yourself. Do you trust the state ? People like to answer in the affirmative, even when boatloads of evidence is available that sometimes significant parts of the state, including the Dutch state, isn't even corrupt, but outright criminal for malevolent reasons (meaning police trying to get innocents convicted out of spite, or revenge, has happened more than a few times).
Jury trials provide some (imperfect) measure of protection against such abuses.
The police and prosecutors in the USA are also rewarded and have a culture that glorifies convictions.
The state has for all intents and purposes unlimited resources to pile on charges, cover up exonerating evidence, they can legally lie to a suspect (“we found a witness you might as well confess”), they can strike jurors who would be more sympathetic to believing that police can be corrupt, etc.
The defense doesn’t have an unlimited budget to hire experts, get evidence independently tested, etc.
If you are poor and/or minority, the state can and will railroad you and the jury that holds your life in thier hands won’t be of your peers. Do you think that a cherry picked jury will really be that concerned if some poor Black kid gets locked up for life?
I did say it's an imperfection measure of protection against that. But frankly, the court is just not going to take you seriously unless it's clear that you will appeal any decision you don't agree with it. Sorry but ... that's how the world works. Still, the alternative in force in Europe does not seem better, in fact it seems significantly worse.
If you watch videos of judges in the Netherlands I assure you, first, the prosecutor is essentially the same, and second the judges ... to say that they are arrogant, unsympathetic and frankly assholes is a serious understatement of reality. Prosecutors are rewarded based on convictions, like in the US.
I think this video, even though the source is a bit ... gmrbl (I DO NOT agree with 99% this website posts) ... But this is the reaction of Jaap Smit, judge and vicepresident of the Amsterdam "fast" court, to a camera:
https://youtu.be/grW-nVrAWvM?t=18s
You can tell what sort of person he is, no ?
They apparently filed a complaint ... and surprise nothing happened.
It's also possible to bribe jurors to get off a conviction. Possibly easier than bribing a judge.
All classes of people are corruptible.
After all, if you don’t know who they are, you can’t bribe them or blackmail them. Same argument applies to the judge.
One-way-glass might be a work of fiction, but video cameras are not.
It's a bit silly to worry about that level of conspiracy.
But even if it weren't silly, there are easy answers. An oversight board, or revealing the jurors after the case is decided, or revealing the entire juror pool of 50 some-odd people, etc.
If I'm going to do something and want to bribe a judge I have years to research all the judges who might be at my trial (there are not very many). Each will have a different bribe that will work. (one doesn't want his wife to know about an affair; the next is in an open marriage and doesn't care but he has big gamboling debts that you can "take care of"...)
On the other hand, it only takes one of the 12 to stop justice from being served if they for whatever reason disagree with the other 11.
> inally, a jury doesn't need law education. Their job is to judge the facts. They are informed of the definitions of the crime, and the evidence, and must reach a verdict of yes he did this or no he did not. Upon rendering a guilty verdict, the actual law part of the law is executed by the judge.
Except they don't just judge facts. They judge based on the stories they're told. Even if the evidence (facts) is lacking, a good story can still sway people. This would be a lot less likely if the panel consisted of people educated on the law (eg. judges). There's a reason the supreme court consists of judges, not 12 (or 9...) random people from your populace.
Combine that with an absurdly low standard of proof and it's no wonder that so many innocent poor people are locked up.
The hardest case was the one that was “not guilty”. The defendant was almost certainly guilty of manslaughter. But for reasons that don’t matter, aspects (time) of key evidence could not be evaluated, which created doubt.
It was a moving experience.
> "The hardest case was the one that was “not guilty”."
Would you clarify? I read the first paragraph as there was one guilty verdict, yet the second paragraph implies there was only one not guilty verdict. Did you perhaps intend two convicted, or alternatively, in the second paragraph, one of the cases that were not guilty?
Blackstone's formulation applies there:
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
In a perfect world, we'd only convict the guilty. The revolutionaries that founded the U.S. decided that justice would be better served by minimizing false positives---the conviction of innocents---instead of minimizing false negatives---the release of criminals. In practice, we've still sent many innocent people to prison (or worse, to death) despite our various protections against false positives, which includes the right to trial by jury.
> This would be a lot less likely if the panel consisted of people educated on the law (eg. judges).
People educated in the law (e.g., judges) would disagree with you:
"Those who wrote our constitutions knew from history and experience that it was necessary to protect against unfounded criminal charges brought to eliminate enemies and against judges too responsive to the voice of higher authority. The framers of the constitutions strove to create an independent judiciary but insisted upon further protection against arbitrary action. Providing an accused with the right trial by a jury of his peers gave him an inestimable safeguard against the corrupt or overzealous prosecutor and against the compliant, biased, or eccentric judge."
(U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron White, writing for the majority in Duncan v. Louisiana, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/391/145/)
What if we restricted jury duty to actively practicing lawyers? Who better to judge the work of a lawyer than another lawyer.
They are supposed to be judging the defendant.
There are lots of ways to twist the language around to make it confusing, and that's all that this does. They are not evaluating the performance of one or more lawyers. They are evaluating all of the evidence before them (all of it that is admissible, anyway) to determine whether the defendant is guilty according to law (as opposed to according to their own feelings, etc.).
You can tell they aren't there to judge the prosecuting attorney's performance because not all of the evidence comes from the prosecuting attorney. Thankfully. If it did, you'd have a lot more false convictions. That's why we have defense attorneys even when we can't afford them ourselves. Likewise, you are not judging the defense attorney's performance, because that would require you to start with an assumption of guilt. Nor are you there to judge the combined performance of both of them. That doesn't even make sense. They are not a team working together. They are there to put evidence before the jury (or try to dismiss evidence in various ways) and try to convince them of a particular interpretation of that evidence. So their performance is affecting the outcome, but they are not the ones being judged.
....
Furthermore any bias in a juror gets averaged over 12 and affects at most one trial.
That’s all good in theory until you have the prosecutors put a “B” by jurors who are Black that they want to exclude.
The prosecutors select for bias.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/05/23/opinions/supreme-court-black-...
Furthermore prosecution and defense get to cross examine and dismiss jurors as part of the selection process. If you want a generally well educated jury you can get one. Ask your trial lawyer which jury is right for you!
And if the prosecutor gets to dismiss jurors that are least likely to convict?
Furthermore it only takes one of the 12 to stop a miscarriage of justice.
Furthermore in the US everyone is at least somewhat indoctrinated with an understanding of what a jury is and a respect for executing jury duty faithfully. You have a pretty good shot of getting at least one person on the jury that won't vote guilty instantly so they can still make the baseball game latter that daY
You’re completely ignoring the social pressure of being the one holdout that you would get from the other 11 jurors to go home and the judge to not have a hung juror.
You’re also ignoring the very real psychology of how many people don’t care about the fate of someone who they can’t relate to - someone who is not of thier same race/economic background/upbringing.
They are informed of the definitions of the crime, and the evidence, and must reach a verdict of yes he did this or no he did not. Upon rendering a guilty verdict, the actual law part of the law is executed by the judge.
That’s all well and good unless the “facts” are being withheld by the prosecutor and not being argued effectively by an underpaid, overworked public defender.
So why are allowing prosecutors to exclude jurors? Would it not make more sense to only allow exclusions with cause?
The prosecutor is no more powerful in this respect than the defense. Defense attorneys also try to get jurors that they think are demographically inclined to acquit their client and then find post hoc causes to dismiss.
>You’re completely ignoring the social pressure of being the one holdout that you would get from the other 11 jurors to go home and the judge to not have a hung juror.
>You’re also ignoring the very real psychology of how many people don’t care about the fate of someone who they can’t relate to - someone who is not of thier same race/economic background/upbringing.
No You're ignoring what I wrote.
"Furthermore in the US everyone is at least somewhat indoctrinated with an understanding of what a jury is and a respect for executing jury duty faithfully. You have a pretty good shot of getting at least one person on the jury that won't vote guilty instantly so they can still make the baseball game latter that day"
I specifically wrote this as an allusion to the movie 12 angry men.
Yes a random group of people, with no training and no one to judge them, will sentence a man to death for the trivial convenience of going home early. But we aren't selecting from a group with no training. We are selecting from a population that embeds the sanctity of a trial into its childhood education and into its national identity. You have a fairly reasonable shot of at least someone on the jury willing to be the one angry man.
If you have a pool of 30 jurors and the prosecution has already chosen to dismiss the six that are most likely to not convict, it doesn’t leave the defense much to work with. The scenario is not theoretical, I linked to a case that went to the Supreme Court.
But ignoring that, the system is not suppose to be “equally weighted” for the prosecution and the defense. It should be weighted more heavily toward the defense in a criminal case. It is suppose to be harder to take someone’s freedom or life away than to convict.
Yes a random group of people, with no training and no one to judge them, will sentence a man to death for the trivial convenience of going home early. But we aren't selecting from a group with no training. We are selecting from a population that embeds the sanctity of a trial into its childhood education and into its national identity. You have a fairly reasonable shot of at least someone on the jury willing to be the one angry man.
We can talk theory of “indoctrination” or we can look at the facts both in the posted article and the one I cited about the prosecution explicitly excluding Black jurors. The lack of concern about anyone who doesn’t look like them runs much deeper than some type of theoretical sanctity of due process.
But that story won't ever make the news. Things that make the news are the shocking exception, not the mundane reality.
The very post we are commenting on is an example of where there was prosecutorial misconduct and a lousy defense.
The mundane reality is that court system and the entire justice system is weighted toward the state and thst there are systemic issues when it comes to equal treatment under the law for the poor and minorities.
My entire point is that juries, as they are currently selected, is the least bad system of rendering verdicts. I also stated quite clearly that a jury is at least no worse than the society it exists within. None of the imperfections you point out are absent in wider society.
I do care that the state that has the power to take away my freedom is treating me fairly. I see first hand the difference in the reaction that people have to my step son now - when he is a teenager over 6 feet tall and big and the reaction they had when he was 9 years old and a short cute kid when I met him.
I very much worry about him getting caught up in the justice system and falsely accused and convicted for “fitting the description”.
And my son grew up in the burbs, attended top rated public schools in affluent areas of town, has a friendship circle that looks like the cast of a CW show and it took years before he realized that his mere statue combined with his race intimidated adults - not teenagers. It seems like the next generation is much smarter.
Its not about caring or not caring about wider society. My point is that a society can't produce a system better than itself. Problems that exist outside the justice system are virtually guaranteed to leak into the justice system.
btw you know that you can actually waive you're right to a jury trial and get a bench trial if you really want one. Of course you have no control over which judge is assigned to you. LMK if you seriously want to take that gamble.
- correctly fund the public defenders office.
- get rid of plea bargains for serious offenses. Right now, prosecutors pile on charges that could add years knowing that most people will plea. If every serious case has to go to trial, prosecutors will have to be more careful about when they bring charges.
- admit that the “war on drugs” has been a failure and stop locking people up for years for non violent crimes.
- get rid of prosecutors ability to dismiss jurors. Yes it will make it harder to convict, but it should be harder.
- stiffer penalties for prosecutors withholding exculpatory evidence.
- stiffer penalties for police lieing under oath.
The idea is that such decisions are not mere technical matters, and the law is not for some "supposedly" impartial technocrats to impose their opinion on, but to reflect what society thinks.
After all it's not some god given or mathematically derived laws that need to be applied, the law is the will of the sovereign people (with some intermediaries as they can't all just draft them together).
Besides the jury system works just fine in other countries.
It's the:
- systemic racism,
- bad incentives for DAs (and political careers associated with being one),
- strict adherence to the letter of the law when the spirit is clearly elsewhere (e.g. judges not freeing people for some technical BS despite full evidence that clears them)
- privatization of the prison system and large interests
- Old Testament-style vengefulness (e.g. death penalty? In 2018? Third world prison conditions? Long term torture-level isolation?)
that breaks down the US justice system.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=In_dubio_pro_reo&...
is not obeyed in the trial. This principle says that a defendant can only be convicted if the evidence is clear that the respective person is guilty. If it is not clear, the defendant is to be let free (or rather: can only be punished for the punishable acts for which the evidence is clear).
As you can see in the Wikipedia article, this principle has been very central in German law for centuries.
I think the problem is related to trust of institutions and a learned blindness. Various participants in a trial all assume the others are working to ensure the correct outcome and don't make every personal effort to do the same.
I remember reading that a judge has, on average, spent 16 minutes or less on convictions for less than 1 year sentence.
The state makes it impossible for people to do that, even if they were so inclined in the first place. And, of course, they have to consider that they go against part of their own organization to make this happen (meaning some of your colleagues will want a conviction and you preventing them from getting that will have costs).
The point of the jury system is to prevent tyranny, especially that experienced in most European countries that had monarchies and oppressive parliaments where angering the government or monarch, being the wrong religion, or having a different ideology would get you convicted very quickly. At least with a jury of your peers you have a chance of getting let off from trumped up charges. Europe _might_ not have the same problems currently, but still nice to have a system that could prevent some egregious things... perhaps including this one.
The idea is a "jury of your peers." Part of the point of this set-up is so that The Haves are not the only ones in positions to make life-altering decisions about people's lives.
Jury Nullification is a thing. There is some degree to which jurors, knowledgeable about how the system has consistently and intentionally screwed over "their people," decide to not go along with railroading yet another person of the wrong color or whatever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
Any time a government is overthrown, one of the first things that happens is they release all the prisoners on the assumption that, regardless of what their conviction is for, these are actually political prisoners. This is a not unreasonable conclusion in most cases.
The “problem” is that few cases go to trial, and many of those lack competent counsel.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the law itself and rules of procedure creates many of the social issues that come up in these discussions. Jurors have the benefit of handicap of weighing evidence presented to them against statute as interpreted by a judge.
In most of Western Europe, juries are only possible for murder (or worse). For everything else, a judge decides without any recourse for the population. There, you do not have the right to a jury trial at all.
For example, the definition of a particular offense (Grievous Bodily Harm, say) is a matter of law, and not up for debate by the jury. The jury's role is to decide whether or not the accused committed that particular crime; eg, does the evidence support ("beyond reasonable doubt") the conclusion that they throw the punch that the prosecution allege caused the injury to the accuser?
Seriously, give this as an answer as a first year law student and you fail. No question. Of course, it's how prosecutors present it to the jury (you might ask yourself the question: given that they misrepresent this, how badly did they misrepresent the crime in the first place ?)
And, frankly, if you knew how the police and penal system worked internally, you would in nearly every last case vote not to convict. It does not fix the crime, it just creates one more victim, and the system is totally inhumane. Even if someone is a criminal and have stolen, or even raped they do not deserve to be subjected to that.
Furthermore, prosecutors lie in court to get people convicted, so how trustworthy is their case, really ? Listen to a few of the dirty tricks police pull to convince juries:
https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE?t=26m48s
Still so ready to convict ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
NO ! Is the only correct answer when on a jury. Ever.
So in any case you're ever going to see in your life: no they don't deserve it. Even for most violent crimes, year-long torture (which is what generously describes the penal system) is not a reasonable outcome.
So in a jury you should always always always vote no.
We acquitted one defendant after a day's deliberation.
We sent the other to jail for a LONG time after spending half an hour talking about it, it was really crystal clear from the evidence (which included a videotaped confession . . . yet the goober insisted on a jury trial, go figure).
I sleep well at nights. Also, if cops seat you in front of a video camera and try to ask questions, don't say anything.
Stupid.
Really don't say anything to cops, especially if you've been placed under arrest.
Given the evidence at hand, we probably would have convicted him anyway. The video was the clincher. Early on the judge mentioned that the defendant had insisted on a jury trial, over the advice of his lawyer (and to some extent the judge, who was broadly hinting that sentencing from a guilty verdict by a jury was going to be a lot harsher than one he could reach with a deal of some kind).
I have to say that his lawyer (a public defender appointed to him, since he could not afford his own) was pretty bad, at least by my unpracticed eye.
> Given the evidence at hand, we probably would have convicted him anyway. The video was the clincher.
If the video of his confession, which you know has been edited by the police and prosecutor's office, I would have voted to let him go. You don't know the pressure that was on the guy during that video, you don't know what else the police left out (e.g. one thing is they do is refusing to help someone, or claiming to refuse, until a confession is extracted and signed, then edit out the part where they refused to help, or lied)
What if the person lied and confessed because the police threatened not to call an ambulance for someone ?
Ironically, this may very well be the reason the "goober" wanted a jury trial in the first place, as people do that thinking it will provide more opportunities for the truth to come out.
This isn't strictly true - s.18 (GBH) requires intent, which is a question for the jury. Furthermore, what constitutes "really serious" injury is a question for the jury. You can break in down into questions of fact (e.g. Did the defendant have intent? Did the defendant cause these injuries? Are these injuries "really serious"?), but it's not as clear cut as did the defendant throw the punch (they must judge if they consider the injuries to be "really serious", which isn't quite a question of fact).
In addition, juries are entitled to make a decision based on their conscience, per Bushel's case.
A related issue is jury nullification [1]. Juries cannot be forced to convict, regardless of the weight of evidence against an individual. This gives juries the ability, whether defacto or dejure, to determine whether or not a law is just. So for instance in the early 18th century New York passed a law making it a crime to criticize public officials. But with juries being unwilling to hold up the law, it had no effect. In more recent times nullification has been invoked, even if not by name, countless times in statutory rape, drug charges, etc. As wiki mentions, the recent sharp rise in hung juries (going from ~5% to 20% in recent years) has also been seen as possible evidence of a rise in jurors considering the validity or fairness of the laws they're being asked to convict others under.
Trial by jury enables a nation to express its own value system, regardless of whether or not those who happen be on top agree.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification_in_the_Unit...