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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

I like being judged by a professional with experience. Judges are great. And if one judge or panel of judges is bad you will notice everything they do will be overturned in appeals.

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.

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Part of trial by jury is to prevent the government from pushing immoral, dictatorial laws on its citizens. I wouldn’t say that Germany has a great track record of avoiding that.

> I wouldn’t say that Germany has a great track record of avoiding that.

Can you please explain this statement? Can you point at immoral dictatorial laws in Germany which do not exist in USA?

> 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?

Trial by jury would have been useless against Hitler. What would have stopped him from abolishing it? Certainly not the Weimar Constitution -- even if trial by jury had been enshrined as a basic right -- because it demonstrably wasn't effective at protecting peoples' rights.

Also, it apparently didn't prevent the Trail of Tears, Japanese internment during WW2, slavery, the continued official discrimination against blacks afterwards, civil forfeiture...

Even after the abolition of juries in 192x, Germany had a system not too different from it: A panel of three professional and six laypeople judges. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emminger_Reform

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.

Hitler was a populist with many popular policies and broad support in the population. Trial by jury wouldn't have slowed him down.

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

Maybe if they'd had their white nationalists cleared out by outside influence it would have. That's what it took with Germany, they should thank the Americans for their part in that.

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.

>Maybe if they'd had their white nationalists cleared out by outside influence it would have. That's what it took with Germany

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.

> You started with "your system is bad because of the one thing that happened 80 years ago"

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification

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