Comment by _nist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _nist | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I think America may be a bit of an exception actually since you guys elect your judges. That sounds ridiculous to me. It is like electing your doctor or your engineers. Some things simply are best left to technocrats.

Except for federal courts. All federal court judges are appointed by the president for life after confirmation from the senate. Only state courts have an election process, in some cases.

> That final hearing was held in public, as all hearings are, it was televised, again as all hearings are, you can read the judicial decision, as with all judicial decision. No one was corrupted. You can't corrupt them, because there is complete transparency.

Not all court hearings are televised, as you stated. The court hearing for repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) was not televised. Most federal trials aren't televised.

Also, just because you can read the judicial decision, doesn't mean that it wasn't a result of corruption during the trial. And once you get the decision, its not like you can fix it if something wasn't right in the decision. Complete transparency would only occur if all court cases were televised and unedited, giving the people access to all evidence.

All court cases are held in public, so if you are interested in the full evidence, etc, you can attend the hearing in person. Moreover, all cases are recorded, so you can request a transcript of the whole process. Most judicial decisions however begin by a summary of the facts and the laws that were in question.

Once you get a decision, you can fix it. You appeal it. If the court was wrong, then the higher court is likely to overturn it.

The point about being able to read the judicial decision is that if the judge applied the law incorrectly, whether because he was corrupted, because he did not like the defendant or anything, if you are a trained lawyer, you can see that the law was applied incorrectly, so you appeal it. If that appeal is successful, the judge below would loose a huge amount of reputation, especially if it was blatantly obvious that he applied the law incorrectly. So no judge would do it. They are paid very handsomely. They probably practised as lawyers before becoming a judge so made quite a bit and therefore they have nothing to gain and everything to loose if they accept being corrupted.

> All court cases are held in public, so if you are interested in the full evidence, etc, you can attend the hearing in person.

Space is limited in a court room. That's why I was talking more about televised sessions.

> Once you get a decision, you can fix it. You appeal it.

Good luck with that. That's all I can say.

> They probably practised as lawyers before becoming a judge so made quite a bit and therefore they have nothing to gain and everything to loose if they accept being corrupted.

That's the problem. Lawyers aren't very good and the laws aren't very clear in a majority of the cases. I have yet to see a judge lose their reputation from having one of their cases appealed. Also, private deals are made with lawyers all the time that are protected by client confidentiality. Do you honestly believe that they would have nothing to gain by exploiting such deals?

> All court cases are held in public, so if you are interested in the full evidence, etc, you can attend the hearing in person.

Most, but not all. The judge can hold a private session if he chooses.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com