It's part of the system of checks and balances. If there isn't at least a plausible case for conviction, the case shouldn't even make it to a jury. The judge is permitted to throw it out for insufficient evidence.
In principle what's supposed to happen is that it prevents a conviction if the prosecution can't convince 12 random people that there should be one. The problem is prosecutors have the full time job of trying to convict people, and one of the ways they do it is by trying to change the system to make that easier. So then convicts get excluded from juries along with anyone else the prosecution thinks might be sympathetic to the defense -- even though having to convince someone initially sympathetic to the defense is supposed to be the point.
Britain famously use juries. That is where the US gets it system from. In. All Nordic countries have had them. In Norway we phased it out years ago, but it isn’t one judge but several. Some are picked by citizens others are professionals. They determine guilt together.
And it's a mistake there as well, but fortunately Brits keep juries only for the worst of the worst cases, jury trials are relatively rare.
>>Juries have also been widely used in Europe.
And now they are not. I can't speak for every reason behind this in every country that decided to do so, but I'm sure if you looked into it it would be "because it isn's working out".
>>but it isn’t one judge but several.
and this is how it should be done - you still get judged by a panel of people who can vote, but they are actually trained in the law.
Juries don't decide the law, they decide the facts.
Why would someone who spends their life in a courtroom have a better understanding of the facts of an ordinary person's life than someone who actually lives an ordinary life rather than being insulated from it by the legal system?
You can't decide the fact - if you could, it wouldn't be a fact. Or do you mean something else here?
>>Why would someone who spends their life in a courtroom have a better understanding of the facts of an ordinary person's life than someone who actually lives an ordinary life rather than being insulated from it by the legal system?
I mean, that should be really obvious in a case like this, no?
It's a distinction between facts and the law.
The judge decides what the law is, e.g. the statute says "knowingly" and someone sent a letter to the company informing them, but the person who read the letter isn't the person who performed the act, so does that mean the company acted knowingly?
The jury decides what the facts are, e.g. the company claims the letter didn't inform them but the sender claims that it did. Both admit the letter existed but neither of them kept a copy of it. The jury decides whose version of the facts is the truth.
> I mean, that should be really obvious in a case like this, no?
Kind of the opposite.
This is one of the problems with "professional" fact finders -- prosecutors get a pretty good idea of what kind of cases they can win and don't bring the ones that they can't. So then any kind of a repeat player keeps seeing people they're likely to find guilty because they're disproportionately more likely to be the ones who come before them, and start to assume guilt, and then carry that into the determination even when someone is innocent. To mitigate that you need fresh eyes.
In most european countries in complicated cases like the one here you'd just get a panel of judges - so you're still getting a vote and a balanced(in theory) opinion, except it's not coming from randoms citizens but people actually educated in the law who should know better than this.
For example, jury service being unpaid will obviously skew the jury pool away from being properly evenly distributed.
People like to point out that this applies to trials for violent crimes etc. too, but it was really the war on drugs that did this, because it required the government to prosecute crimes with no victim -- the drug buyer and the drug seller have no reason to turn each other in, as opposed to the mugging victim who can be generally expected to go straight to the police.
Because convicting people when there is no cooperating victim is so much harder, they went and corrupted the system in order to make it easier, and here we are.