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Comment by expedition32 | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the jury system. If your server is down you don't grab randos from the street to fix it.

Hell Americans know this too which is why you have a professional judge and lawyers. And you guys don't have a night watch with pitch forks and muskets to police the village anymore.

A jury system is an anachronistic relic.

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If your server is down you might ask for advice in an IRC channel, receiving help from whoever is there.

The random selection of juries was supposed to ensure they aren't any special class of people. For instance judges are usually from upper middle class backgrounds and it used to be that your innocence or guilt was decided entirely by the aristocratic nobility. By using random selection, that sort of thing is avoided.

The fundamental idea of a jury, when it comes down to it, is that you're asking 12 random people "was this person's actions reasonable?" given conflicting accounts of what those actions were. The process by which you get there is more convoluted than that (and generally assumes a higher competence by the jury than probably exists), but juries seem to do a very good job of upholding the basic idea of evaluating the reasonableness of actions.

In a jury system, the judge provides instructions to the jury about how they are supposed to weigh the evidence presented against the requirements of the law. They don't need to be technical experts. The theoretical idea of "a jury of one's peers" (while not perfect) is making a fresh decision based on the merits of the singular case, rather than a judge deciding based on prejudices they've built up over hundreds of previous cases.

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