The jury system seems completely corrupt to me. I am glad we do not use this method in criminal trials here in Germany where I live.
After I served on a jury, I had to admit that, whatever its faults, there is some value to occasionally explaining the law to random citizens and asking them to apply it in a given case. It should put a limit on how weird or explicitly unfair the law can be. To be honest, it’s not much of a limit. Several words already have a different legal meaning than their everyday meaning (e.g., in copyright law, “to copy” includes activities that don’t end with an identical copy of the protected work). But there is some limit.
The defense isn't allowed to tell jurors about jury nullification and there's an effort to keep out any potential jurors who are aware of it. In general there seems to be a big effort to not have jurors think to much on their own. Once during selection I mentioned how unreliable eye witness testimony can be (they were trying to weed out anyone who had problems with convicting based solely on eye witness testimony), and the prosecutor asked me "What if the judge told you to give eye witness testimony the same weight as physical evidence?"
I often see people worry that if we didn't have trial by jury a lot more innocent people would get convicted. Yet if you look at a country like Germany, it doesn't have trial by jury and it has ~1/9 the incarceration rate as the USA.
I think it's very telling that the first time, the prosecutor kept asking if people would apply the law as written, and not how they would prefer it to be written. I didn't think I could answer that question without hearing the details, but she refused to provide them (she never got to me, so I never had to answer). It turned out that an inmate was caught with some drugs inside a prison, and she was charged with possession of the drugs, and possession of drug paraphernalia (the paraphernalia being a plastic bag the drugs had been kept in).
The second time, the judge asked if anybody had served on a jury before, and those who answered "yes" were asked if anything happened during that service that shook their confidence in the system. They were specifically cautioned to not go into details so that the rest of us wouldn't be tainted.
Both of those experiences feel like huge red flags for the system in general. But, again, I have to acknowledge there does seem to be some value in including regular citizens. I'm not sure if that value outweighs the negatives. But, it's an explicitly guaranteed Constitutional right in the US, so without an amendment, it isn't going away.
For the record, in the US, if you'd rather take your chances with just the judge, you can waive your right to a jury. But most people accused of crimes seem to believe the jury is a better bet.
Apparently this happens quite a lot in extreme cases like child rape or murder where the accused probably committed the crime but has a defense that replies on legal technicalities. They know that a jury would likely ignore the instructions to focus on the exact law and find them guilty because, well, they probably did it.
Or, if they probably didn't do it (perhaps school nurse convinced the teenager she had been abused and the police officer led the kid into saying what would make up a charge) the accused would worry that the witch hunt attitude of most people (who have children) would not give them a fair shake.
My sister and my father had a strained relationship during her teenager years, and my mother tried to coach her through a criminal charge against him to help her divorce case. Thankfully, my sister eventually relented and recanted. But if it had gone to trial, my father would have not been fairly judged by a jury.
The conviction rate is what you're looking for, and consulting Table 5 and Table 6 of this document:
https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/gap.pdf
We see that Germany has a higher conviction rate than the US.
What we'd really like to see is the rate of false conviction, but this is difficult to determine, for obvious reasons.
The different systems are completely at odds philosophically and require a completely different attitude, which explains so much - Brexit and the antipathy of many Brits towards the EU, and the EU itself are the current exemplar of this - but pick any of the contested parts of the US constitution (like freedom of speech or right to bear arms) and you can gauge support either way by answering the question "do you understand/prefer common law or civil law?"
If you don't trust the citizenry to make decisions for themselves then paternalistic authoritarianism is your preference, and we all know where that leads.
Germany is the exception. Abolished jury in 1924.
Greece, for instance, has a jury made up of judges. That's not a jury, that's an equivocation!
if you face criminal charges is the US, you can have the verdict decided by the judge if you prefer, but it's usually not a good idea. trial by jury tends to favor the defense more than a bench trial (where the judge decides).
imo trial by jury is probably the best part of the US legal system. the real issue is the imbalance in resources between state prosecutors and public defendants. a poor or overburdened attorney can fail to make use of the many advantages you have as the defendant in a jury trial.
Unfortunately, there are many, many problems with it.
Lay judges don't get to see the court record (or even the written indictment), they stumble into the trial unprepared, and since oftentimes the oral proceedings are referring to things in the record, they can easily be overwhelmed and confused.
Additionally, court secrecy is absolute, and they must not tell anyone how they voted or why, so the professional judge can always sabotage an acquittal by introducing an error in the written judgment, which is written without the lay judges, and the lay judges never even see the written judgment.
As a lay judge you walk into the court building in the morning of those days you've been appointed for. You meet the professional judges, and they give you a short rundown of the day planned. Then you start the trials.
Until then you never even knew that Mr Miller was going to be tried for arson or that Mrs Johnson was going to be tried for shop-lifting.
If you walked into the judges office and asked the secretary (well, officer of records) for the indictment, she would tell you to walk away. She, the defender and the prosecutor have the only copies of the record (and in smaller cases the prosecutor does not even have the whole record, just excerpts he photocopied, because the prosecutor in the court room is not the one who worked the case).
Yes, the idea is to have totally uninfluenced lay judges.
In German it's judges. So a judge tries you and says you're guilty or innocent?
You have to forego your right of trial by Jury in the USA for that to be the case.
The decision of facts (as opposed to legal decisions) is a majority vote of professional and layman judges...
edit: major —> intermediate
The problem is selecting good judges. In Germany this seems to work great, but what I see in recent times in the US terrifies me. Voting for judges leads to populists winning, appointing them leads to very questionable people being appointed for their stance on single issues. Maybe the real problem is that the US is so divided with all sides trying to score points against the other side (whether that's Democrats vs Republicans, Feminists vs everyone else, Black vs White, Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice etc). Everything else just follows from that.
Apart from Hitler I can't think of any dictatorial laws in the last 150 years or so of (Western) German history. 12/150 seems better than average, so I wouldn't dismiss anything based on that. Trial by jury didn't seem to help African Americans in the first 100 years or so after slavery was abolished, so that's clearly not foolproof either
Regardless, the foolproof is the enemy of the good. I doubt whataboutery based on whose deeply immoral and harmful behaviour is worse, of all things, is the way to win that argument.
I don't think "cleared out" is the right word. The war killed indiscriminately, and only 200 or so were sentenced to prison. Removing those people from power, let alone the country, would have left to few competent people to run a government. What happened was showing people why Nazis are bad (I think everyone is thankful for that).
> I doubt whataboutery based on whose deeply immoral and harmful behaviour is worse, of all things, is the way to win that argument.
You started with "your system is bad because of the one thing that happened 80 years ago". I think "your alternative failed as well and shows no evidence of preventing the thing it's supposed to prevent" is a perfectly valid counter argument.
I did? Strange, but those quote marks are around something I've never said or written.
> I don't think "cleared out" is the right word. The war killed indiscriminately, and only 200 or so were sentenced to prison. Removing those people from power, let alone the country, would have left to few competent people to run a government.
"Cleared out", while being something I have actually written - in this thread even! - is the correct phrase because it's what happend after the war in an initiative termed denazification. 400,000 Germans were interned[1], which is a tad more than 200.
Can you please explain this statement? Can you point at immoral dictatorial laws in Germany which do not exist in USA?
He mentioned track record - as in a reference to the past. Does the Nuremberg Laws ring any bells for you?
Also, it apparently didn't prevent the Trail of Tears, Japanese internment during WW2, slavery, the continued official discrimination against blacks afterwards, civil forfeiture...
The difference is that these lay judges work alongside the regular judges. They can, for example, ask questions and decide on questions of law as well as fact. They also serve for something like two years and get a few weeks of preparatory classes.
With a 6:3 ratio "the people" had the power to overrule the professionals. Today, the ratio is one of 2:1, 2:2, or 2:3, depending on the crime.
Of course the worst court of all did (pretend) to include "a jury of your peers" (read: Nazis), although they were unimportant enough to not even warrant a mention in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Court_(Germany). (Note the name, though).
That last link is really worth reading, I believe. It'll make you appreciate the rule of law as we (some of us) enjoy today.